Abraham Lincoln ushered our nation through extremely tumultuous times and was also known for a self-deprecating sense of humor. But there's always something new to learn about our 16th president.

But on top of all that, as with George Washington before him and the legendary Teddy Roosevelt after, it turns out Lincoln was also an exceptional, near unbeatable fighter who in his younger years would throw down with anyone who felt like they were man enough. In fact, he often found himself in such matches simply because of his reputation as an exceptional fighter and individuals wanting to test their mettle against him.

Standing at an imposing 6 feet 4 inches (1.93 meters) tall and weighing around 210 pounds (95 kg) with a lean, muscular build, Lincoln was a formidable figure in his prime, noted by his peers as being, to quote one contemporary, “unnaturally strong”. While the future President shied away from manual labour in his youth, being more drawn to books and poetry, his rather humble beginnings ensured he didn’t really have a choice in the matter in the end. For example, he apparently had an axe put in his hands at the age of 8 and was expected to do his part for his family with it. As a result, by the time he reached adulthood, Lincoln had matured into a fine specimen of man, gaining a reputation for his prodigious strength.

We know Lincoln best from his presidency, when he was in his 50s and suffering some physical ailments, including depression. But the young Lincoln was pretty well-known for his wrestling matches, the most notorious of which you can read about at Today I Found Out.

Imagine being a zookeeper somewhere and the animal you are in charge of hasn't had a bowel movement in two years. You might be worried. For most critters, keepers would have tried a laxative before that much time passed, but it's really not all that unusual for the giant isopod, which has a very slow digestive process. On May 26, the caretakers of five giant isopods at the Toba Aquarium in Japan found fecal matter in the tank, for the first time since April of 2018. It was an occasion of joy.

Moreover, the feces was found to contain scales of a fish not served by the aquarium.

This means that the food which went into making this poop must have been consumed over seven years ago, before they came to the aquarium. While it isn’t clear exactly which isopod dropped the deuce, the finding is a breakthrough in the field of giant isopod regularity, and will hopefully trigger more detailed research into the subject.

Read more about the weird eating and pooping habits of giant isopods, and see some strange videos at SoraNews24. -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Eric Kilby)

The sun is the source of all our energy, in one way or another. Could it also be the source of our eventual destruction? This is the latest apocalyptic question presented by Kurzgesagt. However, the earth has some reassuring protections. The giveaway in the title is "civilization," which doesn't mean human life, but the technology we depend on. We've gotten along without it before.

Redditor s1l4z_behr posted this picture asking others what this object is, and what it is used for. Do you have any idea? It's a pretty neat piece of engineering, and would be cool to have. It looks rather old.

When you give up, the answer is here. -via TYWKIWDBI

The general consensus 400 years later is that Isaac Newton was a very smart young man. During isolation from the plague in 1665-66, he discovered gravity and invented calculus. How bored do you have to be to invent calculus? But even very smart young men have their clunkers. When Newton returned to the University of Cambridge’s Trinity College in 1667, he worked on battling the plague. And he came up with a recipe that will scare away the infection, and most patients, we presume.  

The first step in the cure is hanging a toad upside down in a chimney for three days. You’ll know your toad is ready when it pukes and dies; be careful to collect all the vomit, which Newton describes as containing “earth with various insects in it.”

Next, grind the toad into a powder and mix it with the vomit until you’ve formed several lozenges. Finally, place your toad vomit lozenges “about the affected area.”

However, he was a proponent of social distancing. Read about Newton's plague research at Smithsonian.

(Image credit: Fir0002)

The ethereal sounds of Toto's biggest hit are rendered on two Tesla coils. While the song is faithfully reproduced, it does have a bit of a kazoo vibe. Maybe they could tune the Golden Gate Bridge to play this! -via Geeks Are Sexy

In 1870, Frederick "Fanny" Park and Ernest "Stella" Boulton were arrested in London while wearing women's clothing. While cross-dressing was not the main reason for their arrest, it was a minor charge tacked onto the prosecution, and it was the reason that their trial was a sensation in newspapers across England.

It was not just Boulton and Park that were on trial, however. Also facing the same conspiracy and incitement charges were Louis Hurt and John Stafford Fiske, the United State’s consul in Leith, Edinburgh. Three more had absconded – Martin Cumming, William Somerville and C.H. Thompson – meanwhile, another had died, the aristocrat Lord Arthur Clinton, whose love-letters to Ernest Boulton had been discovered by law enforcement. Clinton reportedly died from natural causes, but suicide has always been largely suspected.

Although seeking a guilty verdict for ‘conspiring and inciting persons to commit an unnatural offence,’ the prosecution focused mainly on Boulton and Park’s cross-dressing, and brought in a variety of witnesses who had seen them dressed in women’s clothing.

The conspiracy and incitement charges were hard to prove, and even harder for journalists of the time to write about. Newspapers, like the prosecution, focused on the cross-dressing. However, no one really complained about Park and Boulton and their fashion choices. People who saw them agreed that they were well-behaved and did not bother anyone, so why were they on trial? Read about the sensational landmark trial of Park and Boulton at the British Newspaper Archive. -via Strange Company

San Francisco residents are complaining about loud, whistling music coming from the Golden Gate Bridge. It's been described as deafening to those crossing the bridge, and annoying to people for miles around. Is it the scream of a banshee haunting the bridge?

Nope—the eerie sound you're hearing from the Golden Gate Bridge is in fact the result of new sidewalk railing slats, just installed, meant to curb the wind. Funny thing about wind: when it passes through certain open spaces, it creates a hum. This is how all reed instruments work, and it's something that the engineers of said sidewalk panels apparently forgot to take into consideration.

And, because it spans a very windy gap across the Bay, the Golden Gate Bridge is now effectively a giant orange wheezing kazoo.

Commuters and nearby residents will be glad to hear that there are no plans to fix the problem. Hear more in videos posted at KQED.

For about 50 years, the drive-in theater was a really big draw for movie fans. The advantages over walk-in theaters were that you had privacy (or social distancing, if you prefer), you didn't need to dress up, the kids could sleep in the back seat, and you could “smoke, chat, or even partake of refreshments.” That last one is kind of funny, since partaking of refreshments is the reason walk-in theaters still exist at all. The first drive-in theater opened in June of 1933.

Richard Hollingshead, Jr., the inventor of the drive-in theater, developed the idea during the midst of the depression. He was out of work but figured there were two things people weren’t willing to give up – their cars and going to the movies. He tested his concept by setting up a 1928 Kodak projector on the hood of his family car and projecting pictures onto a screen nailed to a tree in his yard.

Pleased with the results, Hollingshead sought financial backing from his cousin and opened the first drive-in theater. Patrons paid $1 per car or 25 cents per person. Speakers were mounted atop the 60-foot screen but didn’t provide very good sound. It would take years to improve the sound problem at the drive-in. Hollingsworth’s theater design included concentric, curved rows titled at a five-degree angle to ensure that everyone had a good view of the screen.

Drive-in theaters didn't really take off until after World War II, when the sound was improved and more people had cars. Read more about the rise of the drive-in theater at Newspapers.com. -via Strange Company

(Image credit: Laxbot7)

Hertha Ayrton was multitalented mathematician and engineer who filed 26 patents, but ran up against prejudice against women scientists all her life. She married her electical engineering professor, who was in awe of her genius. William Ayrton distanced himself from Hetha's projects, lest he be given credit for what she did, yet that happened quite a few times anyway. She came up with enormously useful breakthroughs and inventions.

In 1893, Hertha took over a project from William investigating the cause of an irritating hissing noise coming from the electric arc, which powered lamps in London at the time. The lamps consisted of two carbon rods with a charge running between them that produced an arc of light in the space between the rods. Hertha was the first to figure out that this loud hissing was due to the oxidation of the carbon electrodes. If you simply enclosed the whole contraption in a bulb so that it was not exposed to open air, the hissing stopped.

Hertha’s remarkable work on the electric arc won the attention and admiration of contemporary scientists. She was the first woman invited to give a paper at the Institution of Electrical Engineers in 1899 and became the first woman elected to membership of that Institution. She spoke about her findings at the International Congress of Women in London and at the Electrical Congress in Paris. Her appearances convinced the British Association for the Advancement of Science to include women on scientific committees.

But even with all this success, she still faced barriers. In 1901, her paper on the electric arc was presented to the Royal Society by a man standing in for her, since women were not allowed admission. In 1902, her name was put forth for admission to the Royal Society but was rejected by a majority of votes because, simply, they were “of the opinion that married women are not eligible as fellows of the Royal Society.”

This decision held even after, in 1906, Hertha became the first woman — and only the second woman to date — to be awarded the Hughes Medal for outstanding research in the field of energy.

Naturally, Ayrton became a suffragist, and even led Marie Curie to come out of her laboratory long enough to support the cause. Read about Hertha Ayrton at Massive Science. Curiously, the article does not say much about her fan invented to clear WWI trenches, but you can read about it here. -via Damn Interesting

In a restaurant in canada last night I was served pudding on, and I wish I was joking, an ancient VHS copy of The Bodyguard pic.twitter.com/53oQfXDlNw

— P.S.Burton (@PSBurton) August 8, 2019

It's been a few years since we discussed the trend of restaurants serving food on something other than plates. Since then, restaurants have been trying to outdo each other in ridiculous methods of presenting your meal. They include a sink, the cook's hand, the diner's hand, rocks, a mousetrap, antlers, and food served right on the tablecloth. How about some broccoli served on a bed of barbed wire?

(Image credit: oldfashioned24)

I don't even know if you'd call four pieces a "serving," but there may have been some already eaten. Anyway, you'll find a ranked list of the most egregious ways restaurants serve food to patrons at Bored Panda.

In 1897, Bram Stoker's novel Dracula introduced the world to the perfect villain, the terrifying vampire who defined horror monsters for more than a century -so far. Countless studies examine the various inspirations for the character of Dracula, many of them leading to Vlad the Impaler, although the historic Romanian ruler added little to the novel besides his name. Another inspiration came from Stoker's mother, whose childhood memories include a cholera outbreak in her hometown of Sligo in Ireland. The 1832 outbreak killed more than 10% of the town's population, but that wasn't the most horrifying detail. Marion McGarry of the Sligo Stoker Society explains.  

McGarry says Stoker was inspired by a grisly account of that epidemic written by his mother, Charlotte Thornley, who hid from the plague in her home before she fled Sligo with her family. Thornley’s essay remained unpublished and buried in a Dublin archive until the Society studied the text and, last year, had it widely circulated.

“Bram as an adult asked his mother to write down her memories of the epidemic for him, and he supplemented this using his own historic research of Sligo’s epidemic,” says McGarry. “Scratching beneath the surface (of this essay), I found parallels with Dracula. [For instance,] Charlotte says cholera enters port towns having traveled by ship, and can travel overland as a mist—just like Dracula, who infects people with his unknown contagion.”

The strongest link McGarry found, though, was between Dracula’s liminal state—being simultaneously dead and conscious—and Thornley’s description of cholera victims who were buried alive. Stoker was morbidly fascinated by this detail. So much so that the working title for his novel was The Undead, before his publisher later changed it to Dracula.

Read more on the connection between Sligo's cholera outbreak and Stoker's vampire at Atlas Obscura.
 
(Image credit: Nick)

Tucker the golden retriever is confronted with an entire roast chicken. How long can he resist taking a bite? Okay, how long can he resist a bite after he knows how it tastes? Longer than I expected. Remember this golden from an obedience challenge a few years ago. But no matter what, Tucker is a good boy. -via Digg

For a couple of years during the Great Depression, people in Chicago could find a free meal at a soup kitchen run by notorious gang boss Al Capone. By then, Capone had racked up millions of dollars in ill-gotten gains, so the cost of his charity was a relative trifle, but it made all the difference in the lives of Chicago residents who had no money for food. And the goodwill generated among everyday people made it harder for the police to investigate his crimes.  

Capone’s charity had no name, just a sign over the door that advertised “Free Soup, Coffee & Doughnuts for the Unemployed.” Inside, women in white aprons served an average of 2200 people a day with a smile and no questions asked. Breakfast was hot coffee and sweet rolls. Both lunch and dinner consisted of soup and bread. Every 24 hours, diners devoured 350 loaves of bread and 100 dozen rolls. They washed down their meals with 30 pounds of coffee sweetened with 50 pounds of sugar. The whole operation cost $300 per day.

The soup kitchen didn’t advertise its connection to Capone, but the mobster-benefactor’s name was connected to it in stories printed in local newspapers like the Chicago Tribune and The Rock Island Argus. Those who were down on their luck, though, apparently had few qualms about eating from the hand of Chicago’s worst crime boss. Often the line to get in to the kitchen was so long that it wound past the door of the city’s police headquarters, where Capone was considered Public Enemy #1, according to Harper’s Magazine. The line was particularly lengthy when Capone’s soup kitchen hosted a Thanksgiving meal of cranberry sauce and beef stew for 5000 hungry Chicagoans. (Why beef and not turkey? After 1000 turkeys were stolen from a nearby department store, Capone feared he’d be blamed for the theft and made a last-minute menu change.)

Read the story of Capone's soup kitchen at Mental Floss.

(Image credit: The National Archives)

We've seen a lot of Rube Goldberg contraptions over the years, but this one is special for quite a few reasons. YouTuber Creezy spent a month building it and another month getting all the components working. When it all works, it's a thing of beauty. First you notice how stunningly elaborate the course is. He uses everything from a whiffle ball to concrete blocks. Then you notice what an awesomely beautiful backyard he has. Then you marvel at the camera work. It's not a drone, but a 360° GoPro MAX that captures all the glorious chaos, straight to the relatively unimpressive end. -via Twisted Sifter