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

It's a common joke on English usage: Why do we drive on parkways and park on driveways? Leave it to the guys from Today I Found Out to take the question seriously and do the research to answer it. Simon Whistler explains where those various words came from.

Sunday marks the 75th anniversary of the flag-raising on Iwo Jima, a moment captured by Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal during the battle on that island in the Pacific. It has been called the most-copied photograph ever, and you'll find few Americans who are not familiar with it- it even inspired the Marine Corps War Memorial. For many, it sums up the entirety of World War II. But in 1945, it was received a bit differently.  

Such flag-raising images routinely appeared in newspaper coverage of island battles such as Tarawa, Guam and Leyte. The newsreels that millions of American moviegoers watched each week also used footage of flag-raisings to punctuate their reports (for example, those depicting the U.S. capture of Peleliu and Kwajalein). The expectation of a triumphant flag planting was so well-ingrained by February 1945 that Dorman Smith’s syndicated editorial cartoon, appearing in newspapers across the country just a few days before Rosenthal’s photograph, depicted a pair of hands jamming an American flag into a rock labeled “Iwo Jima.”

This was a home front, in other words, that was quite used to images of flag-raisings. One might even say that the American people, rather than being shocked by Rosenthal’s image (as many writers have suggested), actually anticipated it.

Besides that, the actual photo was taken a couple of months before that battle was won! Read the story of the iconic photograph in its historical context at Time. -Thanks, Jim Kimble!

(Image credit: Joe Rosenthal/National Archives) 

The Confederate submarine known as the H.L. Hunley delivered a torpedo bomb to the underside of the Union ship Housatonic in 1864, sinking the ship and killing five. But the Hunley also sank, and all eight crew members died. No one knew where the submarine was until 1970, and it took another 30 years to raise it to the surface.   

One hundred and thirty-six years later, in 2000, in a massive custom-built water tank, archaeologists clad in protective coveralls and wearing respirators sorted patiently through the muck and silt that had slowly filled the hull of the submarine as it lay on the bottom of the ocean floor. Accounts of the Hunley’s sinking had assumed horrific scenes of the men trying to claw their way through the thick iron hatches, or huddled in the fetal position beneath the crew bench in their agony. Sinkings of modern submarines have always resulted in the discovery of the dead clustered near the exits, the result of desperate efforts to escape the cold metal coffins; to sit silently and await one’s own demise simply defies human nature.

The crew of the Hunley, however, looked quite different. Each man was still seated peacefully at his station.

What killed the eight men of the Hunley? Rising water or lack of oxygen would have induced a mad dash to escape. Damage from the torpedo would have scattered the bodies and left evidence on the submarine itself. Biomedical engineer and blast-injury specialist Rachel Lance modeled the remains of the submarine and recreated the torpedo incident in a pond (assisted by a bomb-demolition expert and the ATF) to test a new theory on what killed the crew of the Hunley. Read a fascinating excerpt from her book on the subject at Smithsonian.

(Image credit: Conrad Wise Chapman)

People win the internet love to argue about proper word usage. The word "irony" has fueled such arguments since at least 1996, when Alanis Morisette released the song "Ironic." The lyrics are a list of examples of irony, each one subject to debate as to whether it is true irony, situational irony, or not irony at all. Psychology professor Roger J. Kreuz defines irony as a clash between expectations and outcomes, but it's not always that simple. Sometimes it's just sarcasm.  

Some cases, however, are relatively straightforward. Consider situational irony, in which two things become odd or humorous when juxtaposed. A photo of a sign in front of a school with a misspelled word – “We are committed to excellense” – went viral. And the January 2020 rescheduling of an annual snowball fight at the University of British Columbia was correctly described as ironic because of the reason for the cancelation: too much snow.

In other cases, however, a situation may lack an essential element that irony seems to require. It’s not ironic when someone’s home is burglarized, but it is if the owner had just installed an elaborate security system and had failed to activate it. It’s not ironic when a magician cancels a show due to “unforeseen circumstances,” but it is when a psychic’s performance is canceled for the same reason.

It's gotten to the point that many writers just avoid the word "ironic" in order to fend off the inevitable derail about whether it was used correctly. Is that in itself ironic? Read about irony at the Conversation. -via Damn Interesting

In 1966, the idea of a transporter, the way Star Trek characters beamed down to various planets, was amazing. The explanation was that the device disassembled all the atoms of one's body, converted them to energy, zapped that energy to a destination, and then re-assembled them in precise order. And the person traveling didn't even lose consciousness! We later learned that the special effect was invented because it was so much cheaper and faster than sending people off in a shuttle. But how plausible is the concept, anyway?

A team of fourth-year physics students at the University of Leicester crunched the numbers on how long it would take to transmit the necessary information to build a person, and the news isn't good. They even took a shortcut.

Instead of capturing all of the information down to the atomic level, they suggested transmitting just the DNA information of a person, along with a brain state. If you had that information, you could presumably clone a person and then implant them with the mental state of their previous self. It's not exactly teleportation, but it gets the job done.

Only, even that fraction of what makes up a person comes in at 2.6 tredecillion bits. Which is, in scientific vernacular, several boatloads.

The estimated time to transmit, using the standard 30 GHz microwave band used by communications satellites, would take 350,000 times longer than the age of the universe.

That's only the actual transit time. The hard part would be putting all that information back together in the same order. Just ask Seth Brundle. Read more about the real-world aspects of Star Trek's transporter at SyFy Wire. -via Real Clear Science

It appears that Ze Frank read the article Fourteen Fun Facts About Love and Sex in the Animal Kingdom, which we linked here just a couple of days ago. He then ran to get some peacock spider footage from Jürgen Otto (previously at Neatorama) and wrote a little song about the peacock spider's sex life. This amusing video might possibly contain NSFW language, depending on your workplace.

Last week, we shared a map of the Americas by Anna Calcaterra, which made Ohio 2 a viral meme. It turns out that Anna has a long history of spreading chaos. Her father shared some of her earlier projects, including the note above that appeared when she was five years old. A few years later, she was reported for vandalizing Wikipedia in the most delightful way.

After interrogations, I discovered that Anna, then 12 years-old, had done it. I asked her why. She did not have a satisfying answer, but the real answer revealed itself in her non-answer: she is basically just an agent of chaos. She's the dog who doesn't know what she'd do if she ever caught the car she was chasing.

And her brother Carlo has gone viral a couple of times already. Both have outshone anything their father has posted on social media. "Which, given that I have been a professional journalist for an international media company for a decade, is quite the damn thing." And both have managed to leverage their work for their own benefit. Read about the viral family at Craig Calcaterra's blog. -via Metafilter

After ten years of testing every box possible, it looks as if Maru has found the perfect one- a box he can fit into, sort of, and carry around with him. A box he can wear while doing other things. And one he can get out of when he wants to!

See more of Maru in previous posts.

Don Merton with the kakapo named after Richard Henry.

The kakapo is native to New Zealand, a flightless and rather friendly bird that smells like papayas. They evolved under no threat from predators until humans arrived, yet they weren't endangered until weasels and ferrets were introduced in the 1860s to control the invasive rabbit population (the best-laid plans and all that). The kakapo's declining numbers alarmed taxidermist Richard Henry.    

In 1893, in Auckland, New Zealand, 48-year-old Richard Henry was going through a peculiar midlife crisis. It wasn’t for any of the usual reasons, such as a failed marriage (though he had one) or a failed career (though he had been chasing a dream job for several years), but rather it was over his obsession with flightless, moss-colored parrots called kākāpōs. Henry had observed the birds’ steep decline after mustelids, such as ferrets and stoats, were introduced to the country, and had spent much of the previous decade trying to convince scientists that the birds were in real danger of going extinct, write Susanne and John Hill in the biography, Richard Henry of Resolution Island. But Henry, who did not have traditional scientific training, went unheard by scientists. On October 3, a deeply depressed Henry attempted to shoot himself twice. The first shot missed and the second misfired, and Henry checked himself into the hospital, where doctors removed the bullet from his skull.

Henry recovered, which was good news for the kakapos. He spent years hunting the birds and taking them to safety. While Henry's efforts were akin to sticking one's finger in a dyke to hold back a flood, his ideas are being resurrected today in order to save the last 211 kakapos in existence. Read about the kakapos of New Zealand and the man who tried to save them at Atlas Obscura.

(Image credit: Errol Nye, National Kakapo Team, DOC. enye@doc.govt.nz)

This Honest Trailer contains spoilers, but I don't care, I watched it and now I want to see Knives Out. It's a star-studded murder mystery, which is usually not my cup of tea. But how could you not want to watch a film in which James Bond has a "Kentucky fried Foghorn Leghorn drawl"? Besides, it was both a critical and box office hit, and everyone I know who saw Knives Out said they liked it. Screen Junkies appears to as well, although they did find plenty of ways to poke fun at the movie.

Houseplants have received an enormous boost in popularity from Instagram. As you would expect, this led to houseplant influencers, or "plantfluencers," who sell trendy plants like the pink princess philodendron, shown above. When the pink princess became hot, it began to be called a rare plant. It's not rare because it's endangered, but because of the demand. A pink princess philodendron that sold for a few dollars a couple of years ago can now command hundreds of dollars. Jeannie Nguyen is a plantfluencer who sells cuttings of in-demand plants, including the pink princess.

So when Nguyen noticed a new pink plant making the rounds on Facebook last year, she was intrigued. The pink congo philodendron’s leaves were pointy, not heart-shaped like the pink princess, but they had the same shock of bubblegum. Nguyen had never heard of the plant before, but already she saw it was approaching pink princess-level prices. When she found a seller on Facebook offering a pink congo for $70, she nabbed it. If the pink princess was anything to go by, Nguyen thought, she could be buying in to the next big thing at a bargain. When her new pink congo grew big enough to sell the cuttings, she might even strike it rich.

What Nguyen didn’t know at the time was that her latest investment was unlikely to yield any viable pink cuttings at all. The pink congo is not a variegated plant, like the striking pink princess philodendron, but a Cinderella plant—one that would return to an ordinary philodendron in a matter of time. Another plantfluencer would later call it “a massive scam.”

Read how the pink congo scam took hold of the Instagram houseplant craze at Wired. -via Metafilter

Although she is far from the first to do it, Gwyneth Paltrow has made bank on the idea that women can achieve beauty like hers by simply buying her Goop brand wellness products to transform one's body inside and out. More than 100 years ago, another attractive blonde became fabulously wealthy in much the same way. Madame Yale developed and sold products backed by questionable scientific claims and savvy marketing.     

Madame Yale rose to fame during a boom era for female beauty entrepreneurs, shortly before Elizabeth Arden and Estée Lauder, whose makeup empires endure today. But Madame Yale stood apart from these makeup moguls by promising to transform women from the inside out, rather than helping them hide their imperfections. That was itself an ingenious ploy: Because wearing visible makeup remained a questionable moral choice in the period, many women flocked to Yale’s product offerings, hoping to become so naturally flawless they wouldn’t need to paint their faces. In the 1890s, her business had an estimated value of $500,000—around $15 million in today’s money.

In the archives of the New Orleans Pharmacy Museum, among yellowed advertisements for cocaine-infused toothache drops and opium-soaked tampons, I found a tattered promotional pamphlet for the centerpiece of Yale’s business—Fruitcura, the product she advertised most widely. Madame Yale said she had come upon the elixir during a dark period, recalling “my cheeks were sunken, eyes hollow and vacant in expression, and my complexion was to all appearances hopelessly ruined. My suffering was almost unbearable.” She also noted that “physicians had long before pronounced me beyond their aid.” But when she imbibed Fruitcura regularly after “discovering” it at age 38, she “emerged from a life of despair into an existence of sunshine and renewed sensations of youth.” In Yale’s account, sharing Fruitcura with her “sisters in misery” (that is, selling it to them) was now her almost sacred purpose.

Read about the rise and fall of Madame Yale and what her story says about the pressures women operate under at Smithsonian.

Between 2003 and 2005, people in Italy had what was called "53 fever." A popular lottery had players choosing numbers, and the number 53 just stopped coming up. Therefore, people bet on 53 because obviously its time was coming. But that's not how numbers and probability work. This is called the gambler's fallacy, and it turns out that people with higher IQs are more susceptible to it than the general population.    

To find out if you fall for the gambler’s fallacy, imagine you are tossing a (fair) coin and you get the following sequence: Heads, Heads, Tails, Tails, Tails, Tails, Tails, Tails, Tails, Tails, Tails, Tails. What’s the chance you will now get a heads?

Many people believe the odds change so that the sequence must somehow even out, increasing the chance of a heads on the subsequent goes. Somehow, it just feels inevitable that a heads will come next. But basic probability theory tells us that the events are statistically independent, meaning the odds are exactly the same on each flip. The chance of a heads is still 50% even if you’ve had 500 or 5,000 tails all in a row.

This fallacy is important even if you don't play gambling games. Imagine you are applying for a job, a loan, or school admission. If the person interviewing you just had several stellar applicants, they might erroneously assume that they are due for a poor one, which could be you. Read about the gambler's fallacy and how it affects everyday life at BBC. -via Digg

(Image credit: Antoine Taveneaux)

One of the joys of visiting a Gothic cathedral is the beauty of the stained glass. You might think what a shame it is that such artistry has succumbed to cheaper and more modern decoration, but it hasn't completely died out. For 50 years now, Canadian stained glass artist Josef Aigner has been installing church windows that blend traditional Gothic and modern styles to bathe the interiors in colorful light that is its own form of worship. 

Churches and stained glass have been outsize presences in Josef Aigner’s life since his birth in Gerzen, Germany, in 1945, a few weeks before VE Day. By the time he was 6 years old, Aigner’s family had moved to nearby Isen, and at the age of 8, Aigner was an altar boy at Isen’s ornate Catholic church, which was conveniently located across the street from his house.

“We got paid 10 cents per mass,” Aigner tells me over the phone. “I saved enough money to buy myself a pair of skates. Our church had beautiful Baroque windows,” he adds. “They’re still there.” Isen, it seems, was just far enough outside Munich to escape the carpet bombing that flattened half of that city, so other than a lack of heat in winter, Aigner’s memories of his postwar childhood are largely positive. “The American soldiers parked their big tanks right in front of our house,” he says, still sounding excited by the memory. “I loaded up on all the chewing gum they gave me. It was a good time.”

Collectors Weekly spoke to Josef Aigner and his daughter Cloe Aigner, author of a new book about her father's work. Read about his life and the art of stained glass church installations, and see more marvelous pictures at Collectors Weekly.