Psst! Wanna learn some cool facts to impress the kids? Then you might learn a few unfamiliar things about familiar products. Nike shoes, orange juice, vacuum cleaners, champagne, wigs, hoodies, hot dogs, they're all here. Some of the facts just make you go "Hmm," while others may turn you completely off.
See 26 trivial facts about stuff you might use every day at Cracked.
The last ice age began just as humans were beginning to move out of Africa, and only began to wane around 18,000 years ago. For a long time, the extreme cold was assumed to be the reason that no human artifacts older than that have been found in the Arctic Circle. Yet Siberians migrated into the Americas during that time, albeit below the Arctic Circle, so they must have been tough people. A Siberian archaeological site first discovered twenty years ago is beginning to reveal just how tough they were.
The situation changed when a Russian geologist, searching for animal fossils, came across a foreshaft (the detachable end of a spear) crafted from a wooly rhinoceros horn. At 70 degrees latitude, the site was well north of the Arctic Circle, along the Yana River about 60 miles from its outlet to the Arctic Ocean. The artifact was almost certainly ancient, considering wooly rhinos were Ice Age creatures, now extinct.
In 2001, excavations began at this Yana “Rhinoceros Horn Site” (RHS), led by archaeologist Vladimir Pitulko of the Institute for the History of Material Culture in St. Petersburg, Russia. Over the next two summers, the team unearthed hoards of stone tools, animal bones and artifacts carved from mammoth ivory. Because the finds were buried under about 30 feet of frozen ground, perishable remains were exceptionally well preserved.
But the most exciting results from these initial digs were radiocarbon dates published in a 2004 Nature paper: The Yana RHS site was roughly 30,000 years old, which more than doubled the age for humans in the Arctic Circle.
Read about the thousands of artifacts retrieved from Yana and what they tell us about the people who made them at Discover magazine. -via Strange Company
(Image credit: Basilyan et al. 2011 Journal of Archaeological Science)
Do you eat Brassica oleracea? You probably do, even though you didn't realize it. Uncultivated, it's known as wild cabbage. But over several thousand years of selective farming, we've turned it into a large part of the produce section of your grocery store. The graphic above doesn't quite do justice to the many different foods that have been developed from this one plant. All those vegetables are the same plant species. -via TYWKIWDBI
(Image source: Banjulioe)
A plastic doll comes with perfectly coifed hair, often in curls. If the doll gets played with, eventually you end up with hair like My Little Pony Pinkie Pie, shown above. Combing plastic hair is not easy, and even if you get the tangles out, it often only leads to more frizz. Jen Yates tried out some hair setting tips and ended up with Pinkie looking good as new!
It's been 37 years since E.T. phoned home. Xfinity went all out for their Christmas greeting, in which our beloved extraterrestrial returns to earth for a holiday visit, and finds that Elliot (again played by Henry Thomas) has aged quite a bit and has children of his own -who look an awful lot like young Thomas and Drew Barrymore. -via Buzzfeed
Marie-Madeleine Fourcade was born into privilege in France in 1909. She grew up as a socialite, and gained notice as a reporter in the Paris fashion industry. Fourcade was also independent and adventurous, qualities that gained focus when Germany invaded France during World War II. The socialite became a resistance spy and recruiter and then leader. Fourcade was captured by the Gestapo twice.
The second time Marie escaped arrest was a much closer call and far more extraordinary story. In a Gestapo prison in Aix-en-Provence, she considered taking cyanide that she’d kept hidden on her in case of capture, but knew by doing so, she would be sentencing the rest of her remaining agents to death as well. In her cell, there was a small barred window with wooden boards to let in a small amount of air and light. When her guards went off duty in the small hours of the morning , she stripped naked and began forcing her petite body through an impossibly tight opening. After a few failed and excruciatingly painful attempts, Marie had made it out, clutching her dress by her teeth, bloody and bruised. Dodging the flashlight of a guard who had heard noises, she darted across the street to find refuge inside the mausoleum of a cemetery. She later found a small creek to wash her wounds and lose the scent of blood that would surely put German search dogs on her trail.
Read the rest of that story and those of Fourcade's other exploits at Messy Messy Chic.
An 18,000-Year-Old Puppy Has Been Found In Siberian Permafrosthttps://t.co/kroxT80zH5 pic.twitter.com/c7LpPYrb1n
— IFLScience (@IFLScience) November 28, 2019
A frozen dog has been unearthed in Siberia in amazingly fresh condition. They named him Dogor, which means “friend” in Yakutian. Scientists believe he was about two months old at his death. They are not sure if he was an ice age wolf, a modern wolf, a domestic dog, or possibly something in between.
While the work has managed to discover the specimen is male and approximately 18,000 years old, preliminary genome sequencing was unable to tell whether it is a wolf, a dog, or perhaps a proto-dog common ancestor of the two.
“The Centre has Europe’s largest DNA bank of all canines from around the globe, yet in this case they couldn’t identify it from the first try,” Love Dalén, professor of evolutionary genetics at the CPG, told The Siberian Times.
“This is intriguing, what if it’s a dog? We can’t wait to get results from further tests,” added Sergey Fedorov from the Institute of Applied Ecology of the North at the North-Eastern Federal University in Yakutsk.
Humans started to settle in this northern part of Russia around 32,500 years ago. Furthermore, previous research has suggested that humans domesticated dogs from wolves some 10,000 to 40,000 years ago. This means that Dogor could, in theory, fit anywhere within this range as a loyal household dog, a ravenous wild wolf, or anything in between.
The only thing everyone can agree on is that he was a good boy. -via Metafilter
A delivery truck in Brookhaven, Georgia, spilled part of its load on Tuesday. The Brookhaven Police Department dispatched officers posthaste to bear witness to the tragedy. Several cases of Krispy Kreme donuts were scattered about the road, and some were even in the gutter. It was a traumatic experience for the responding cops.
The Associated Press has more.
Police say their response time to the call was stellar, but they missed the five-second rule. The post asked for thoughts and prayers as the total loss of the doughnuts deeply affected all the department’s officers.
Police later added a comment with an update to the so-called tragedy. It says officers in Gainesville sent a batch of sympathy doughnuts to Brookhaven police in their time of mourning.
Thoughts and prayers. -via Boing Boing
Well, that didn't take long. The notorious 11 foot 8 bridge in Durham, North Carolina, was raised to a new height of 12 feet 4 inches. We thought that might be the end of the website 11 foot 8, which documented the many trucks whose tops were sheared off by the bridge after the driver underestimated their truck's height, or else was not paying attention. But Jürgen Henn still has his webcam trained on the Gregson Street trestle, and on Tuesday it caught the first incident since the bridge was raised. A rental truck scraped against the bridge, and small pieces fell off. We don't know the extent of the damage, since the truck didn't stop.
In 1926, a woman sent a gift to President Calvin Coolidge- a raccoon to be served for Thanksgiving dinner. The note that came with it said that it had a "toothsome flavor." The president did not eat the raccoon for Thanksgiving, nor did anyone else at the White House. But despite the title, we never get an explanation of why not in an article at Atlas Obscura. What we do get is a history of raccoon as dinner in America, and we find out what happened to the toothsome raccoon that was presented to Coolidge.
(Image source: Library of Congress)
And Instagram account called Please Hate These Things posts design fails from all over. Some of them you've seen before. Some are the deliberate results of questionable taste, while others you can tell have a long story behind them.
Your job is to learn from the real-world failure of some of them and learn to distinguish which are most likely Photoshop jokes.
Or you can see a ranked list of the 40 most egregious entries from Please Hate These Things at Bored Panda. Be aware that some of the images are NSFW.
If you want to make a proper Welsh rabbit, first you must build a log cabin. Jon Townsend (previously at Neatorama) brings us an 18th-century recipe for toasted cheese, or Welsh rabbit. I'm all in for that! But we watch Jon for more than recipes. He knows all that one can know about the American frontier of the 1700s, and he teaches it to us in such a pleasant manner. If you want to watch how he built that cabin, continue reading for the three-part series.
Many long-time cooks consider the Crock Pot to be an appliance of the 1970s, even though we still use them. Some still have their slow cooker from that time, while others have had to adapt to higher-temperature modern cookers. So you may be surprised to learn that the Crock Pot was patented in 1940. Really. However, the idea behind it is even older.
The Crock Pot’s story began during the 19th century in Vilna, a Jewish neighborhood in the city of Vilnius, Lithuania. Once known as the "Jerusalem of the North," Vilna attracted a thriving community of writers and academics. There, Jewish families anticipated the Sabbath by preparing a stew of meat, beans and vegetables on Fridays before nightfall. Ingredients in place, people took their crocks to their towns’ bakeries—specifically, to the still-hot ovens that would slowly cool overnight. By morning, the low-and-slow residual heat would result in a stew known as cholent.
Long before he invented the modern slow cooker, Irving Nachumsohn learned of this tradition from a relative.
Nachumsohn's invention was called the Naxon Beanery, which may explain why it didn't take off right away. Read how the Crock Pot came about, and how slow cookers became a must-have appliance at Smithsonian.
(Image credit: Janine)
Claws came first, and fingernails and toenails were a later adaptation. But nails developed for animal lineages that had already diverged from each other, so there must be reasons they were better than claws for certain species. This TED-Ed lesson gives us some ideas for why that happened. -via Laughing Squid
Amina spent three months making this huge Snorlax out of blanket yarn for her friend. He's a lucky guy! To judge the size of this thing, consider that the guy is 5' 10" tall. You could have one, too, if you've got the bucks and can wait a couple of months. She is selling them through her Etsy store KnotAgainByAmina. -via Geeks Are Sexy
