The 1999 movie Galaxy Quest combined comedy, action, and science fiction. Tim Allen, Sigourney Weaver, and Alan Rickman are actors starring in a sci-fi TV show similar to Star Trek, fandom and all. But the aliens don't realize that, and recruit the show's cast into an actual intergalactic war. It's a fun premise, and Galaxy Quest won several science fiction awards. Now Screen Junkies goes back twenty years to re-examine the movie for good and bad and meta. Mostly good.    

The unripe fruit of the jenipapo berry (Genipa americana) contains a substance that turns other things blue. Since 2017, chefs in Brazil have been using the tropical fruit to create startlingly blue foods.  

Jenipapo berries, which can grow anywhere from the size of a kiwi to a melon, are used by Brazilians to make compotes, syrups, and a famous liquor. But it’s the unripe and bitter fruit that has piqued the interest of cooks and chefs all around the country. When it’s unripe, jenipapo contains high amounts of genipin, a substance which reacts with proteins and amino acids in the presence of oxygen or heat, resulting in an edible blue pigment.

Brazilians have long used jenipapo for various purposes. During the colonization of South America, European conquerors reported curiosity about the use of the fruit’s juices as temporary tattoo ink by communities such as the Tupinambás and the Pataxós.

New techniques have been developed to take the bitterness from the unripened fruit, and the results are astonishing. These dishes aren't just faintly blue, they are vividly colored in a hue that will remind you of Pantone's Color of the Year for 2020. See more such creations, and read about the rise of Brazilian blue food at Atlas Obscura.

You've probably never heard of the malady called milk sickness. It was the scourge of Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Michigan in the early 19th century. The story of the condition is disturbing, not only from the number of people who died, but also by the lack of proper scientific investigation, at least by scientists and public health officials.

William Tompkins and Barnet Fowler, farmers in Kenton County, KY, were the first to be officially identified as having died of the mysterious ailment, in 1795. Nearly one fourth of the early settlers in Madison County, OH, fell victim to the pestilence, but the worst recorded incidence was the ‘epidemic’ of 1818 in which nearly all of the residents of Pigeon Creek, IN, were exterminated. The disease’s most famous victim was probably Nancy Hanks, mother of Abraham Lincoln, who died of it that same year, in Spencer County, IN.

Dr. Thomas Barbee of Bourbon County, KY, the first to diagnose the disorder, in 1809, understood that his patients became sick as a result of drinking milk or eating butter from cows who trembled, though it wasn’t at all clear to him what was causing the cattle themselves to become ill.

What to do? After decades of milk sickness ravaging the countryside, the research was crowdsourced. Really. The government of Kentucky offered a reward to anyone who could identify the source of the illness. While no one collected the reward, the source was identified. However, it took almost another hundred years for official recognition of the cause of milk disease. Read about the fight against milk disease in a two part post at Appalachian History.  -via Digg

Warning: the linked article is not for the squeamish. In 2019, as in every other year, some strange medical stories made national and international headlines. Did you hear about the man who injected himself with his own semen? An erection that lasted nine days before treatment? If those make you cringe, you'll really tense up when you read about certain parasites that caused extreme suffering one way or another. Read the synopses of five odd medical cases from the last year at Gizmodo, with links to the original reporting if you want to know more.

You've seen, or heard about, a trick to keep cats off the counter by covering it with aluminum foil. Cats just don't like to walk on foil. Maybe it's the reflectiveness, or maybe it's the way it crunches and makes noise. Pusic (previously at Neatorama) is a much beloved pet and a YouTube star. What will he do when confronted with a floor made of aluminum foil? -via Digg

Cracked gives us a pictofacts list that everyone can relate to. We all have moments of utter unfairness in our lives that stick with us forever, while the perpetrator probably never thought a thing about it, never considered it wrong, and wouldn't recall it today if their life depended on it.

Honestly, these stories are so egregious and so sadly commonplace that it was hard to choose just a few to share here.



See all 36 stories at Cracked.

The Pantone Color Institute has announced its Color of the Year for 2020: Pantone 19-4052 Classic Blue.

A timeless and enduring blue hue, PANTONE 19-4052 Classic Blue is elegant in its simplicity. Suggestive of the sky at dusk, the reassuring qualities of the thought-provoking PANTONE 19-4052 Classic Blue highlight our desire for a dependable and stable foundation on which to build as we cross the threshold into a new era.

Imprinted in our psyches as a restful color, PANTONE 19-4052 Classic Blue brings a sense of peace and tranquility to the human spirit, offering refuge. Aiding concentration and bringing laser like clarity, PANTONE 19-4052 Classic Blue re-centers our thoughts. A reflective blue tone, Classic Blue fosters resilience.

It's a nice color, although way more conservative than their past choices. Classic blue is especially nice to see in nature. But "nice" never set the world on fire. Fast Company thinks it's an awful choice. Dezeen thinks it should have been green. What's your opinion?

Cyriak Harris (previously at Neatorama) has gathered up all his Teddy bears for his latest video adventure into surrealism. Also buildings, cats, cars, sheep, and spider webs made of rope. This one could easily be looped into an endless sequence of weirdness. Other news from the YouTube page is that Cyriak wrote a novel about a horse.

Life was simple for Buttercup the horse. Chewing grass in a field, gazing dreamily at passing clouds or standing at a hedge to watch the world go by. Perhaps a light nap followed by a gentle canter and more grazing, and then off to the stable for a programme of psychological tests designed to expand the boundaries of horse consciousness.

For Betty and Tim, life was also simple. Or at least as simple as life could be when you are scientists conducting neurological experiments on a horse. That is until the day they discovered their horse was conducting an experiment of its own.

-via Laughing Squid

Wichita Falls, Texas, was once an oil boomtown, so investors thought they were getting in on the ground floor of the coming real estate returns by building a skyscraper. Whether the story behind the "world's littlest skyscraper" is true or not, it's a great story. Tom Scott tells us what he knows.   

In the Ask Metafilter forum, hapaxes.legomenon told a story that cat owners can relate to in one way or another. The entire family got sick, and the litter box wasn't cleaned for a few days. When  hapaxes.legomenon recovered somewhat and tended to the litter box, which is in the laundry room, a child's sock fell into the box at the beginning of the process.

Somehow, at this moment, the echoing cavern off her brain made an incredible leap of logic. I myself did not uncover this understanding for several days.

The problem is thus: she has associated sock-in-box with litter-box-gets-cleaned and, it being the third fact her brain possesses, will not let go of the notion no matter how untrue it is.

I clean it every day, but she keeps dragging socks and other small clothing items in there. She doesn't go on the material, just puts it on top of the litter, but it still gross. I've been washing everything but that doesn't seem super hygienic (the alternative seems both expensive and environmentally wasteful). With the litter box in the laundry room she has easy access to victims, but even when I've been diligent about not leaving out a single scrap of fabric in there, she'll drag something through the entire house to pursue her objectives. I have witnessed it, and was scared it was a mouse. It was another white toddler sock.

The question is, how to get a cat to un-learn this idea? Cat lovers know that some kitties collect things, often small items of clothing. They also develop weird habits. My white cat puts two hair elastics in the shared kibble pan, which annoys the other cats. It might be a territory thing, but I remove them and then all is well. Read the full story, the experiences of other Mefites, and suggestions on how to change the cat's mind.

(Unrelated image credit: Flickr user schmilblick)

In the latest installment of his True Facts series, Ze Frank tells us all we need to know about mudskippers. These are unusual fish, and not just because they are funny-looking. They did not evolve to walk on land, but they do it anyway. And that's just the beginning of their weirdness.  

Both my grandmothers were wonderful cooks, as far as I can remember. I also recall my mother's culinary skills as superb, even though she quit cooking at all some time ago. But my father used to tell stories of when Mom was young and burned everything. I don't recall those times myself. And I've had enough mothers-in-law to realize that you do not became a great cook just from many years of doing it. They were never masters of the kitchen like my grandmothers were.   

But none of it would really matter, because scientifically speaking, the greatness of her cooking goes so far beyond the simple spectrum of palatability. “Food memories feel so nostalgic because there’s all this context of when you were preparing or eating this food, so the food becomes almost symbolic of other meaning,” Susan Whitborne, professor of psychological and brain sciences at the University of Massachusetts, told HuffPost in 2017. “A lot of our memories as children, it’s not so much the apple pie, for example, but the whole experience of being a family, being nourished, and that acquires a lot of symbolism apart from the sensory quality.”

Which is to say that every time I eat my grandmother’s cooking, my tastebuds act as a sort of time machine for my subconscious, transporting me back to all those times she let me eat a jar of Nutella and go ape on the drum kit she bought me. In that way, my draw to her cooking is sort of like Pavlov’s dog experiment, only in this case, I’m the dog who’s been conditioned to believe that her stews are culinary Valhalla.

That explains why your grandma's cooking is so good, while other people's grandmas could be complete failures. Science tells us the same factors may be at work to make you really hate particular foods. Read more about these findings at Mel magazine.

Shown above is a patent illustration for a peculiarly masochistic device called the Mama Robot. The South Korean patent is held by 정인필. Check out what it's supposed to do.

The Mama Robot is creepy in many ways. As far as I can tell, it's a device that allows children to punish themselves when they know they've been naughty but their parents are away.

The child is able to decide how many lashes with a cane they deserve, and the Mama Robot will then deliver the punishment. As it does so, the prerecorded voice of the parent will admonish the child, but simultaneously the Mama Robot will weep "such that the sad feelings of the parent punishing are conveyed to the child."

Since patent illustrations are often simplistic and hard to date by just looking at them, you may get the idea that this is pretty old by its purpose. No, the patent was granted in 2017! You have to wonder what potential manufacturers think of the idea. Read more about the Robot Mama at Weird Universe.

A fully intact 1930s fresco painted by Frederick Olmsted Jr. was found beneath layers of paint on the plain white walls in the hallway of the venerable San Francisco Art Institute. It's one of a dozen murals painted over at the institute. https://t.co/BZnEelgkzM pic.twitter.com/5pQmX5bfRT

— NBC Bay Area (@nbcbayarea) December 13, 2019

San Francisco Art Institute Facilities Manager Heather Hickman Holland noticed some unusual bumps in a wall at the school. She first thought they were cobwebs, but later realized they were outlines of faces! A little digging revealed that there are a half-dozen or so  murals underneath the painted walls at the school, frescoes painted in the 1930s as a project of the Works Progress Administration.

The school received a city art grant to uncover small squares of paint on the walls, revealing hints of what may lie underneath. The school eventually received grants from the Henry Mayo Newhall Foundation and the national Save America’s Treasures to finally remove the paint on the wall where Olmsted’s mural was believed to rest.

As architectural conservator Molly Lambert and her team began peeling away the paint, the faces of 1930s workers began to emerge from their long slumber. The nine figures were back at work cutting and moving slabs of marble, smoking cigarettes and polishing the newly cut pieces.

“Of course when you uncover something like this you’re not sure what the quality’s going to be,” Lambert said. “But this is fantastic.”

Once the bulk of the paint was removed, the work came down to a lot of delicate scraping to remove the final layers. Lambert estimated the fresco was covered over in some dozen layers of paint.

The first fresco revealed was a work by Frederick Olmsted. Read about the discovery at NBC Bay Area. -via Metafilter

Simon's Cat meets an annoying crow in this Christmas cartoon. The story is only two minutes long; the rest is an ad, with a short preview of an upcoming cartoon at the end.