The surreal picture above is titled "Frozen mobile home." It won French photographer Greg Lacoeur the title of Underwater Photographer of the Year for 2020. The caption:

Massive and mysterious habitats, icebergs are dynamic kingdoms that support marine life. As they swing and rotate slowly through polar currents, icebergs fertilize the oceans by carrying nutrients from land that spark blooms of phytoplankton, fundamental to the carbon cycle. During an expedition in Antarctica Peninsula with filmmaker Florian Fisher and freediver Guillaume Nery, we explored and documented the hidden face of this iceberg where crab-eater seals have taken up residence on icebergs that drift at the whim of polar currents.

Lacoeur's photograph also won the Wide Angle category. See the winners in each category at PetaPixel, and browse through all the top-placing images at the contest gallery. -via Digg

Vultures are fairly disgusting birds, and when you see one circling in a movie, it's never a good sign. But every species has its niche in the ecosystem, and vultures fill the role of nature's cleanup crew. "It's a dirty job, but someone's gotta do it." And where vultures are endangered, we find out how valuable they really are.  

Although the war had been going on for years, the US entered World War II rather suddenly when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. The secrecy of the attack left Axis ambassadors, consular officials, and their families behind enemy lines in America. The government had to make a quick decision about what to do with the Japanese diplomats, as well as those from Germany and Italy.

Newspapers’ vitriolic headlines, editorials, and racist caricatures of buck-toothed Japanese fanned the flames of animosity, especially against the two most reviled men in America: Ambassador Kichisaburō Nomura and Special Envoy Saburō Kurusu, who had been sitting in Secretary of State Cordell Hull’s office as the bombs rained down on Hawaii. They were two among hundreds of Axis diplomats living and working in the nation’s capital. Fearful of envoys’ ongoing communications with home, the Roosevelt administration made a controversial decision to send these foreign nationals and their families to remote luxury hotels. The primary goal of this plan was reciprocity—the hope that good treatment of enemy diplomats here would engender the same for American counterparts trapped overseas. (It did not.)

This roundup, detention and eventual repatriation of more than a thousand Axis diplomats and dependents, little remembered today, was a cause célèbre that rocked the nation and enraged many Americans. “May I ask why our government deems it necessary to pamper the delegation of Yellow Rats by housing them at one of the country’s finest winter resorts?” fumed one Washington state resident to Senator Monrad Wallgren. A railroad executive from New York wrote to Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles: “As a patriotic American for many generations, [wouldn’t] any old wooden shack be good enough? Why coddle German and Jap prisoners who are all bitter enemies of our country, and who would ruin us if they had half a chance?”

The diplomats were assigned to three luxury hotels: the Homestead in Hot Springs, Virginia, the Grove Park Inn in Asheville, North Carolina, and the Greenbriar in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia. The Greenbriar was the most successful of the diplomatic internments due to the attitude and leadership of its management. The locals hated having the enemy among them, the diplomats complained about the accommodations, and the employees were vilified from both sides. Yet they stood up and offered the utmost in service because the government had decreed that's how it should be. Could the Greenbriar's wartime professionalism have been a factor in it later becoming a congressional fallout shelter? At any rate, read how the staff at the Greenbriar learned to be diplomats themselves as they swallowed their pride and did their patriotic duty at Smithsonian.

If you lived in London in 1665, your chances of dying were fairly high. Communicable diseases were rampant, sanitation was hit-and-miss, and health care providers didn't have a lot to offer. What you died from could be pretty much anything, since the science of diagnosis was often a matter of guessing. London employed searchers of the dead to determine a person's cause of death, which was important in tracking victims of the plague. These searchers were mostly older, uneducated women who had no better opportunities, and they were subject to pressure and bribery. Therefore, London records show causes of death as simple as old age, falls, and childbirth, and as inexplicable as surfeit, grief, and rising of the lights. While the deceased might have been embarrassed to die of "winde," the survivors would be okay with anything that didn't lead to a quarantine of the remaining family.

Matt Round created the game Death Roulette, in which you spin the wheel (figuratively) to be assigned a random death date and cause based on the actual records from that week in London. As you see, I died of winde, which is "paroxysms of severe gastrointestinal pain," or just what you thought anyway, farts. If the odds were also based on the records, most of us would die from the plague. -via Boing Boing

Sick flip bruh pic.twitter.com/gADC0Qs213

— Human Beeing | 🐐 (@human_not_bees) February 19, 2020

You may have seen a Tweet somewhere, or many places, over the weekend featuring a guy in high heels doing a backflip. It ends disgustingly poorly, but has nearly 14 million views so far. It probably helps that everyone who saw it had to watch it again. Now we know who is behind it. The guy in the video is circus acrobat Jiemba Sands (previously at Neatorama). The ending is the work of VFX artist Raghav Anil Kumar.  

Anil Kumar noted that Sands' content is usually surprising, like when he gracefully trips over a log or falls off a tree branch, but still ends up on his feet.

"My goal was to up the levels on both those aspects and I think the idea worked," Anil Kumar said. "I tried to challenge myself to make something that's already unexpected even more unexpected, and Jiemba's content was the perfect fit for this."

An Instagram video shows how it was done.



Read more about the project at Mashable.

Thomas Bowrey traveled to Machilipatnam, on the coast of India, in 1673. He saw many strange and fascinating things that were completely unfamiliar to an Englishman, including the consumption of Bangha and Gangah, which left users in a besotted state.

Bowrey initially compared the effects of the drug to alcohol. Yet it seemed that bhang's properties were more complex, “Operat[ing] accordinge to the thoughts or fancy” of those who consumed it. On the one hand, those who were “merry at that instant, shall Continue Soe with Exceedinge great laughter”, he wrote, “laughinge heartilie at Every thinge they discerne”. On the other hand, “if it is taken in a fearefull or Melancholy posture”, the consumer could “seem to be in great anguish of Spirit”. The drug seemed to be a kind of psychological mirror that reflected — or amplified — the inner states of consumers. Small wonder, then, that when Bowrey resolved to try it, he did so while hidden in a private home with “all dores and Windows” closed. Bowrey explained that he and his colleagues feared that the people of Machilipatnam would “come in to behold any of our humours thereby to laugh at us”.

Yes, they probably would have laughed. Bowrey chronicled the experiment and immediately looked for a way to import and sell cannabis, as did others who followed. Read about the impressions cannabis left on the English at the Public Domain Review. -via Nag on the Lake

(Image source: Rijksmuseum)

The first blood transfusions took place long before we had any concept that blood came in different types. That is frightening to think about. Most patients died, but for some reason they kept trying. Aren't you glad they finally figured it out? -via Geeks Are Sexy

People living close together in cities is the most efficient way to run a society, because population density is the key to offering services and building social ties. But there's a limit to the benefits of density. City planning regulations are the reason that New York and other cities do not resemble Kowloon Walled City, an organic experiment in density that was demolished in 1993. New York saw the future looming, like a massive skyscraper, in 1915.

The Equitable Building is sometimes cited as the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back, but this structure was more accurately the canary in the coal mine, signaling rather than leading to the end of space-maximizing skyscrapers — structures filling out their lots and rising straight up into the air. Completed in 1915, it was the latest in a growing number of such structures, with two sections cut out (making its plan view into an ‘H’ shape ) to allow some daylight access for central occupants of this dense architecture.

This structure and buildings like it were relatively unconstrained at the time, leading developers to take full advantage of every square inch. As they grew taller, however, more and more citizens expressed concern about the shadows they cast on adjacent structures and the ways in which they loomed up over and choked off the streets below.

The result was New York’s 1916 Zoning Resolution, the first such law in the US. Every skyscraper that came afterward had to be designed to let sunlight in to people on the streets. Read how that works at 99% Invisible. -via Digg

(Image credit: Antonio Knauth)

In the sport of hockey, the goaltender is a unique position, requiring such a particular set of skills that a team cannot just substitute another player at the net. Teams keep two goalies ready, and also a designated emergency backup, an experienced amateur, on the off chance that their two goaltenders are injured. Saturday night, the Carolina Hurricanes saw both their goalies injured, and called up 42-year-old Zamboni driver David Ayres to fill in. He made eight saves on ten shots to help the team defeat the Toronto Maple Leafs. A good time was had by all.  -via reddit

See also: When this happened a couple of years ago.

Brisbane, Australia, has a shelter for pet rats. Really. Rachie's Retirement Home takes in rats, cares for them, and hopes to find new homes for the rodents. Each week, the sanctuary features the best and worst rat of the week, detailing the reasons for the designations. 



See all the rats of the week in a ranked gallery at Bored Panda. Through them you will learn the quirks of different rats and get a taste of the shenanigans that go on at a rat retirement home.

A viral video for the children's song "Baby Shark" by Pinkfong has made a ton of money for the company SmartStudy, especially when you combine the revenues from the various versions of the video, a TV series, and all the merchandising associated with it. But who wrote the song? While making some efforts to enforce copyright, SmartStudy claims the song itself is in the public domain because it originated in the early 1900s. Today I Found Out combed the records, and pinpointed the origin of the song closer to 1975.  

So next time you’re sitting in your car in traffic going to your dead-end job that you loath, just remember, there is a company out there who has literally made at minimum tens of millions of dollars already off a song they plucked from, allegedly, the public domain, modifying it only slightly from an existing version, claimed the copyright on that version based on those tiny modifications, did a few minutes of recording, presumably a day or two of video editing, uploaded it on the interwebs, and now will be cashing checks for it for the rest of their lives, as well as their kid’s lives and beyond.

While the actual person who wrote "Baby Shark" is still mystery, its origin story may be surprising to you. You can read what's been uncovered at Today I Found Out.

The impression that the everyday people (anyone outside of fashion historians) have about Victorian garb is that everyone dressed alike, in multiple layers of drab clothing that covered their whole bodies. What we see from back then is early portraiture, in black and white, in which people dressed to the nines. The clothes they wore every day became worn out and haven't survived to go on exhibit today, and fashion fads rose and fell too fast to be well known. The truth is, fashionistas of the Victorian age were just as colorful as they were in paintings of earlier days and Instagram shots of later days. For example:

Hot pink: In 1860, two new aniline dyes were developed for clothing: magenta and solferino (like fuchsia). Magenta was so popular that it was referred to as “the queen of colours” and was used to dye dresses, underwear, petticoats, ribbons, bonnets, and stockings. That’s right—the most popular color of the 1860s was neon pink. Black and white photography doesn’t really do it justice.   

Goth accessories: In 1875, dog collars, chokers, and chains were some of the most popular jewelry trends. Bats, crucifixes, and insects were common motifs for accessories throughout the decade, and daggers that opened into fans were a must-have. Although it’s difficult to find written references to fishnet or fishnet clothing prior to about 1900, here’s an actual photo of Johanna von Klinkosch wearing fishnet sleeves in the 1870s. Madonna, who?

Women also wore men's clothing, tattoos, and pierced nipples. Read more of the fabulous and fleeting styles of the Victorian era at Dirty Sexy History.

When I saw the title question, I figured it was because bicycles greatly outnumber cars in Amsterdam and most towns in the Netherlands. But there's a lot more to it than that, due to the culture of cycling.  -via Digg

Back when medical schools were new and people had yet to donate their remains for anatomy class, "resurrectionists," or grave robbers, sold bodies to the schools. In England a group called the London Burkers (John Bishop, Thomas Williams, Michael Shields, and James May) supplied colleges with corpses. It eventually occurred to the Burkers that digging up graves was a lot of work, and it would be easier to procure fresh corpses by just murdering people.   

Some of the bodies sold by Bishop and Williams were not stolen corpses but rather people they had murdered. The two men operated similar to two other murderers out of Edinburgh named William Burke and William Hare, who ended up in Madame Tussaud‘s Chamber of Horrors because of their horrible crimes. Like them, Bishop and Williams lured victims to their dwelling, drugged, and killed them.

The site of the horrific murders by Bishop and Williams was in the East end, north east of St. Leonard’s Church in Shoreditch in an area known as Nova Scotia Gardens. The area had previously been a clay field where clay was extracted to make bricks. However, once the clay was exhausted, it was converted into a “leystall” waste area that held human excrement. Cottages had been built on the lower grounds of the clay pits, but they were not very desirable because they were prone to flooding. Yet, despite their undesirability, Williams and Bishop rented No. 2 and No. 3 respectively from Sarah Trueby.

Williams and Bishop’s murders were discovered after they delivered the corpse of a 14-year-old boy from Lincolnshire (later determined to be Charles or Carlo Ferrari) to King’s College. The men had previously tried to sell it at Guy’s Hospital, but negotiations broke down when they wanted too much and the men then took the body to King’s College where they made a deal.

Medical colleges preferred fresh corpses for their studies, but this one was a bit too fresh. While school officials looked the other way when accepting remains stolen from graves, they did not condone murder. Read about the Burkers' trial and the revelations of their string of murders at Geri Walton's blog. -via Strange Company
(Image credit: Wellcome Collection)

We will probably never know exactly how many people Jane Toppan killed in the latter half of the 19th century. She was a trained and popular nurse, always very attentive to her patient's needs. However, many of her patients died. They were elderly and in pain, and most readily took the lethal doses of medicine Toppan gave them. It was difficult to prove that was murder, so she more often got fired instead.

Toppan was dismissed from Massachusetts General in 1887, yet she received a recommendation to Cambridge Hospital. However, she was dismissed from Cambridge shortly thereafter too, for similar complaints. She left Cambridge Hospital the same way she left Massachusetts General, without her nursing certification.

When she was later asked about her loss of credentials, she told the Boston Daily Journal: “I don’t care. I can make more money and have an easier time by hiring myself out.” And with her unflagging self-assurance, she did that.

Toppan served in many homes as a full-time direct-care nurse, and when she tired of caring for her fussy, elderly patients, she overdosed them, first on morphine and then atropine, drugs with counteracting symptoms that helped her experimentations go undetected. She revealed in her confession that she did not do this quickly, but rather she savored the power of pushing her victims to the brink of death and then bringing them back to life, all the while observing the effects.

In addition to her patients, Toppan killed her foster sister, her landlord, and all of her landlord's family. Read about Toppan's murderous career, including an account from a survivor and Toppan's own remarks, at Narratively. -via Damn Interesting