Adrienne Raphel wrote a book about crossword puzzles and was shocked to learn that they are barely over 100 years old. But crosswords are far from the only word games, which have been around probably as long as words have been written down. Or maybe even earlier, but how would we know? We do know that word squares go back to the Roman Empire, because they carved them in stone.  

The ancient Romans loved word puzzles, beginning with their city’s name: the inverse of ROMA, to the delight of all Latin lovers, is AMOR. The first known word square, the so-called Sator Square, was found in the ruins of Pompeii. The Sator Square (or the Rotas Square, depending on which way you read it; word order doesn’t matter in Latin) is a five-by-five, five-word Latin palindrome: SATOR AREPO TENET OPERA ROTAS (“the farmer Arepo works a plow”).

The Sator Square is the “Kilroy Was Here” of the Roman Empire, scrawled from Rome to Corinium (in modern England) to Dura-Europos (in modern Syria). It’s unclear why this meme was such a thing. “Arepo” is a hapax legomenon, meaning that the Sator Square is the only place it shows up in the entire corpus of Latin literature—the best working theory is that it’s a proper name invented to make the square work.

Note how you can read the square horizontally or vertically, beginning in any corner. Raphel also gives us an overview of the rise of palindromes, acrostics, riddles, and various other puns at The Paris Review. -Thanks, WTM!

(Image credit: M Disdero)

After months of Star Wars fans picking apart The Rise of Skywalker, the movie is finally available for home viewing. That means Screen Junkies is obligated to give us an Honest Trailer and fit all the complaints into just a few minutes. Well, that's not possible, but they do their best, and managed to shoehorn quite a few jokes in there, too.

Hello, my name is Tim and I am the head of security for The Cowboy. I have been asked to take on the additional duty of social media management while the museum is closed. I’m new to this but excited. My team will also continue to protect and monitor the museum. Thanks, Tim Send pic.twitter.com/bPiXD9DoAd

— Nat'l Cowboy Museum (@ncwhm) March 17, 2020

The National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City has closed to the public, but they have an exponentially-growing presence at Twitter. See, they gave their social media responsibilities over to Tim, their security guard, and he's having a heck of a time figuring out how to use Twitter.

Thanks for all the tips, Friends. Realize I have been doing the hashtags wrong. I need to use that pound sign from the phone. I’m learning! Here’s his costume from True Grit from 1969 courtesy of John Wayne Enterprises. #HashtagJohnWayne Thanks, Tim pic.twitter.com/AZu7EidGu2

— Nat'l Cowboy Museum (@ncwhm) March 19, 2020

Luckily he has his grandson Lucas to advise him.

Lucas, can you read this?

— Nat'l Cowboy Museum (@ncwhm) March 18, 2020

This is some truly genius performance art, but that doesn't make it any less funny. Really, #HashtagJohnWayne is returning results. You can follow Tim's Twitter adventures at the museum's feed, or check out the highlights at Boing Boing.

Bacteria was discovered in 1676, fungal spores even earlier, but viruses are too small to be seen under an ordinary microscope. They also don't act like other life forms, and for a long time, scientists argued over whether they existed at all, and then over whether viruses are living things. The discovery of viruses came about when botanists studied a plant disease.  

 In 1857, farmers in the Netherlands reported a disease threatening another economically vital crop: tobacco. The leaves began turning a mottled dark green, yellow, and grey, causing farmers to lose up to 80 percent of crops in affected fields. Massive fields of tobacco that had been planted with the same crop repeatedly were especially susceptible. Once the disease reached a farmer’s field, it spread rapidly.

“It's very easy for it to move around,” says plant virologist Karen-Beth Scholthof of Texas A&M University. “If you're in a greenhouse or your garden and you're watering with a hose and the hose touches an affected plant, you can end up damaging a plant next to it.”

In the Netherlands, plant pathologist Adolf Mayer began researching the disease in 1879 and named it the “mosaic disease of tobacco.” He tried to use Koch’s guidelines, which call for a series of germ isolations and re-infections, to find its cause. But Mayer ran into trouble. Although he showed that the sap from a sick tobacco leaf could pass the disease to a healthy leaf, he couldn’t produce a pure culture of the pathogen and couldn’t spot the culprit under a microscope.

“The tools did not exist to see a virus,” says biological anthropologist Sabrina Sholts, curator of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History’s Outbreak exhibit. “It was just this invisible contagion.”

A series of botanists worked on the problem over several decades to unwind what caused tobacco mosaic disease. It was a virus, a tiny packet of DNA that needs to invade a living cell in order to reproduce. Read how they figured that out at Smithsonian. 

The further you go in this stop-motion video, the more amazing it gets. Eventually, the laws of physics are broken in all sorts of ways! Omozoc made this with no CGI at all, just stop-motion animation -and at least a dozen new decks of cards. -via Digg

Yesterday, Rick couldn't find his cat. He looked out the window to find Biter re-enacting the classic motivational poster with the caption "Hang in there!" She fell to the ground soon after the picture was snapped. He later posted a picture at reddit to show everyone that she is, indeed, fine.

He explained that she was named Biter because she bit a friend soon after they got her, but she's a sweet cat now. Meanwhile, the original image got over 100,000 upvotes and is bound to become a classic.

Sarah Winchester, widow of the Winchester Repeating Arms company founder, spent 38 years adding onto her home until it was an eccentric and unique American landmark. If you've always wanted to see the Winchester Mystery House, but haven't been able to get to San Jose, California, or else can't afford the $20-$54 tickets, here's a way to do it. Since tours are closed down for the time being, you are invited to tour by video. The video tour is 41 minutes long, and not only shows the house interior, but also has documentary touches that accompany the Sarah Winchester story. -via Boing Boing

The bee hummingbird is barely larger than a bee. Found mainly in Cuba, they lay eggs in a nest the size of golf ball. Meet this itty bitty bird in a video from Nature on PBS. -via Nag on the Lake

We know that cats can drive you insane. In 1895, Miss Lillie James was admitted to the psychiatric ward at Bellevue hospital. She was known as a "crazy cat lady" with at least a dozen cats. And she knew who was to blame.  

Miss James agreed to being admitted–on one condition. The two cats that she brought with her to the hospital would also have to be committed to the asylum. After all, she said, it was the cats who were insane. She was perfectly sane and clear of mind.

“It is their conduct that has placed me in my present condition,” she told the doctors. “These cats and nine others have conspired against me and affected my health, with the idea of getting possession of my property. Are these guilty cats to go free while I am locked up?”

Although the hospital refused to admit the cats, one most wonder if they were allowed to stay on the grounds. By 1899, there were more than three dozen cats living at the large Bellevue Hospital complex. And in 1904, there was at least one feline in residence that we know about for sure: a white kitten named Red Cross.

The article at The Hatching Cat is not about Lillie James nor any other cat lady. It is about the adventures of the Bellevue hospital kitten known as Red Cross.

(Unrelated image credit: L. Prang & Co.)

Sheldrick Wildlife Trust in Kenya is primarily an elephant orphanage, but they take in wildlife babies of other species who need help. This little zebra is named Diria. He was orphaned when a lion killed his mother.

Little Diria - named after the ranch where he was rescued - arrived into our care at the end of February, fluffy and sporting brown and white stripes (Zebras are famous for their black and white striped appearance, however when they are born they are in brown and white). Since then we have provided Diria with the constant company (and milk feeds) he would have received from his mother, with our keepers even wearing a specially made coat when they are caring for him.

Zebra foals imprint on their mother’s striped pattern and the coat allows Diria to imprint as nature intended, without him becoming too attached to any one individual. A technique we have successfully employed over the years with other rescued zebras, who are now living wild.

Diria appears to be adjusting to his new caretakers quite satisfactorily. -via Bored Panda

(Image credit: Sheldrick Wildlife Trust)

Soft things include kittens, pillows, and sweaters right out of the dryer, but also clouds, ice cream, and airplane landings. When Gizmodo came up with their latest Ask Giz column, they consulted different experts and mainly got a discussion as to how the question is impossible to answer. John E. Hayes of the Sensory Evaluation Center at Pennsylvania State University said,

Softness is fundamentally a perception (a percept). This implies it occurs in the brain, which in turn means that it can only be measured with a human assessor. With any human sensory system, there are limits of detection, both at the high end and low end, and outside these limits, we cannot tell (perceive) a difference, even if a machine or instrument might. Consider the hardness of cut glass and a cut diamond—when we touch them with our fingertip, they each depress our skin (and the mechanoreceptors in our skin) by roughly the same amount, so we cannot tell them apart, even if a lab instrument could.

But still, most came up with a possible answer, depending on how you define the question. Read their thoughts at Gizmodo.

(Image credit: Benjamin Currie/Gizmodo)

twin babies chatting about coronavirus pic.twitter.com/3AH3Jk3v5f

— valeska (@iatemuggles) March 21, 2020

These unidentified twin toddlers are most likely not in an official quarantine, but have learned the terms already as their parents explained germs. They also know about batteries and spring time!  

their memory of this will be so different from ours lol death, panic, hoarding for us VS mom and dad at home all day forever!

— valeska (@iatemuggles) March 21, 2020

Did I say they were unidentified? Their beds are labeled A and B. -via The Daily Dot

In ancient times, people didn't understand that birds migrate through the seasons. They just knew that some species disappeared and then popped up again in a different part of the year. Some written accounts hold some rather fanciful explanations for that, including the origin of the barnacle goose, which grew from floating logs. Gerald of Wales wrote, in the 12th century,

There are likewise here many birds called barnacles, which nature produces in a wonderful manner, out of her ordinary course. They resemble the marsh-geese, but are smaller. Being at first, gummy excrescences from pine-beams floating on the waters, and then enclosed in shells to secure their free growth, they hang by their beaks, like seaweeds attached to the timber. Being in progress of time well covered with feathers, they either fall into the water or take their flight in the free air, their nourishment and growth being supplied, while they are bred in this very unaccountable and curious manner, from the juices of the wood in the sea-water. I have often seen with my own eyes more than a thousand minute embryos of birds of this species on the seashore, hanging from one piece of timber, covered with shells, and, already formed. No eggs are laid by these birds after copulation, as is the case with birds in general; the hen never sits on eggs to hatch them; in no corner of the world are they seen either to pair or to build nests.

This turned out to be very convenient for the Catholic Church, as the barnacle goose could be classified as something other than meat, and therefore eaten during certain fasts. Learn about the barnacle goose and the real story behind it at Amusing Planet.

What do you do when you're staying at home and practicing social distancing? Make a faux retro sitcom intro about staying at home and practicing social distancing! And the rest of us, who are staying at home and practicing social distancing can watch what others are doing to entertain us during our time staying at home and practicing social distancing. By the way, Eleanor Lawrence is not completely isolated. Her boyfriend Kieran Murray was behind the camera the whole time. -via reddit

Update: The pilot episode is out now!

When James Bedford died in 1967, his body became the first to be frozen in hopes of resurrection someday when medical science had advanced enough to save him. That was over 50 years ago, and the company that froze him eventually went bankrupt, as did other early cryonics firms.

As to what happened with these early companies, the big issue, beyond equipment failures and faulty procedures resulting in accidental thawing, was that they relied on friends and family of the deceased to make regular payments to keep the bodies nice and frozen. Should the deceased’s loved ones choose to cool on making such payments, which almost universally happened rather quickly, their “mostly dead” loved ones would then be allowed to warm and become all-dead. Although interestingly in at least one company’s case, they were found in 1979 to have thawed, some intentionally others accidentally, 17 of the 18 bodies they were storing without notifying anyone… Naturally, lawsuits ensued, but the company was bankrupt at that point.

In other cases, once the bodies were accidentally thawed or payments ceased, the companies simply notified the deceased’s next of kin, transferring the bodies to them for disposal like you would any other body.

Things have changed since then. Newer companies have financial setups that make them a little more stable. Read about the business of cryonics and what happened to James Bedford at Today I Found Out.

(Image credit: Dan)