Steve Barley is nuts about squirrels. He's been building obstacle courses for the squirrels in his backyard for years.

Back in 2010 my son and I made the first obstacle course from old bric-a-brac and a washing line for the black squirrels in our back garden to crack. Nearly ten years on, my back garden challenges for our furry friends have become bigger and more elaborate or, as my wife puts it - 'Really, this is getting out of hand!'

You'll find plenty more squirrels trying to outwit Barley's devilish contraptions at his YouTube channel. -via Metafilter

We want those who commit violent crimes to be caught for reasons of justice, deterrence, and also to get answers behind the crimes. That was not to be in the case of the "Italian Unabomber," who crafted explosive devices that targeted random people -often children- in the regions of Veneto and Friuli-Venezia Giulia in Italy.  

Between 1994 and 2006, a mysterious individual terrorized the north of Italy with over 30 improvised explosive devices. His signature? Most of his explosives were tiny and hidden in everyday objects. The ghoul went as far as cracking open eggs, putting in a miniature explosive, gluing the shells back shut, and then placing them back into cartons. See, that's why you always check your eggs.

Because of his wave of tiny terror, the media dubbed this explosive fearmonger the Italian Unabomber. Unlike the American Unabomber, the Italian one never communicated with the public to reveal some grand manifesto. In fact, the only thing the police ever found out was that they liked hurting children -- planting bombs inside candy, Nutella jars, bubble blowers, and a felt-tip pen that almost cost one young girl her hand and eyes. A particularly nasty job was wrapped in paper so that it resembled a message in a bottle, taking the hand of a hopelessly romantic passerby.

The bomber was never caught, but the incidents mysteriously ceased after 2006. Read that story, plus those of the billionaire who tried to spawn and army of children, the man who wanted to murder the owner of Big Cat Rescue, and other bad guys at Cracked.

(Image credit: Cory Seward)

We've seen plenty of time-lapse videos of stars moving across the sky. Aryeh Nirenberg took a different route and stabilized the stars, therefore showing how the earth moves relative to the sky. Images were recorded at 12-second intervals over a period of three hours. -via Boing Boing

We are used to seeing married couples in old TV shows and movies sleeping in twin beds. You will be forgiven if you thought that was only because of the Hays Code and network censorship. Ricky and Lucy and Rob and Laura each had their own bed. But sleeping in twin beds was encouraged for married couples for about a hundred years!

In her new book, A Cultural History of Twin Beds, Hinds details how doctors warned of the dire consequences of bed-sharing. In 1861, doctor, minister and health campaigner William Whitty Hall’s book Sleep: Or the Hygiene of the Night, advised that each sleeper “should have a single bed in a large, clean, light room, so as to pass all the hours of sleep in a pure fresh air, and that those who fail in this, will in the end fail in health and strength of limb and brain, and will die while yet their days are not all told”.

In the 1880s, a series of articles by Dr Benjamin Ward Richardson warned of the risks of inhaling a bedfellow’s germs: “I cannot do better than commence what I have to say concerning beds and bedding by protesting against the double bed. The system of having beds in which two persons can sleep is always, to some extent, unhealthy.”

However, the spread of marital twin beds was slow, and peaked in the 1930s. Read about the rise and fall of twin beds for married couples at the Guardian.  -via Damn Interesting

You can almost see the gears in this cat's head doing the calculations necessary to jump to wherever he's going. Nowhere in there is any thought of what could go wrong, and certainly no idea of what eventually did go wrong. -via Digg

Pauline Cushman went to New York City to become an actress. After her husband died in the Civil War in 1862, she found work at Wood's Theater in Louisville, Kentucky. That's where she became a spy for the Union Army.

As the legend goes, Cushman was set to perform a scene in the play The Seven Sisters in which she proposes a toast. Two rebel officers, Colonel Spear and Captain J. H. Blincoe, offered her money to drink to the Southern Confederacy. After confessing this dare to Union authorities, she was directed to take the bet in order to ingratiate herself with Southern sympathizers and feed information back to the Union.

On the night of her performance, Cushman raised her glass and shouted, “Here’s to Jefferson Davis and the Southern Confederacy. May the South always maintain her honor and her rights!” The audience fell silent, before chaos ensued and Cushman was swiftly fired from the production.

What Cushman lost in roles she gained in Southern approval. According to the 1865 biography, Cushman was embraced by Confederate circles and began spying for the Union, with storied escapades like wearing men’s clothing to intermingle with rebels. One account even reports that she discovered her landlady mixing poison in the coffee of wounded Union soldiers and had her arrested.

After the war, Cushman resumed her acting career and was regarded as a star that burned even brighter because of her wartime heroics. You'll find more of Cushman's story, including some of her exploits as a spy, in an article about the current exhibit called Storied Women of the Civil War Era at the National Portrait Gallery. You'll also get a glimpse at some of the other fascinating women featured in the exhibit at Smithsonian.

You can tell whether a book or a newspaper is new from its color, as they all tend to turn a bit yellow over time. The reason why this happens involves both history and the chemistry of paper. Simon Whistler of Today I Found Out is happy to tell us all about it.

Tattoos are personal and often meaningful, but a new concept might make them infinitely useful to a lot of people. If you were a diabetic, wouldn't you rather get a tattoo once than to prick your finger to test your blood several times a day? Scientists have developed sensors that change color due to body chemistry that can be placed under the skin, but near enough to the surface for the color change to be visible. These can be incorporated into tattoos, and anyone who sees them will consider them art instead of a medical device.   

Using tattoos for diagnostic rather than cosmetic purposes is a new concept. Researcher Ali K. Yetisen, who works at the Technical University of Munich, Germany, and his colleagues thought the technique could be helpful to place sensor formulations at spots in the body where they can record changes in metabolic substances directly, without any spatial distance or time delay, and perhaps for a very long period of time.

The researchers then identified and adapted three colorimetric chemical sensors that produce a color change in response to biomarkers. The first sensor was a rather simple pH indicator consisting of the dyes methyl red, bromothymol blue, and phenolphthalein. If injected into a model skin patch—a piece of pig skin—the resulting tattoo turned from yellow to blue if the pH was adjusted from five to nine.

The other two sensors probed the levels of glucose and albumin.

The scientists in Germany who published the paper linked above are not the only ones looking into the possibility. Read about the company Dermal Abyss which is also working on tattoos sensors at Bored Panda. 

(Image credit: Angewandte Chemie/Wiley-VCH)

The YouTuber who goes by the name Id Watch That reimagined the new movie Cats as a horror film. This trailer mashup incorporates footage from Pet Sematary, Bird Box, and A Quiet Place to make the theme perfectly clear. King himself appears to like it.

https://t.co/cPEYS5hT7e
I got nothin'.

— Stephen King (@StephenKing) August 15, 2019

-via Uproxx

The Bolshevik Revolution made Russia a communist nation, but it was a few years later in 1923 that the Soviets arrived to organize the upper eastern reaches of the country like Chukotka, the peninsula that extends out into the Bering Strait. Here lived the indigenous Yupik people, who hunted walrus, and the Chukchi reindeer herders. The Yupik were somewhat open to the communist way of life, and formed collectives to produce a steady supply of walrus meat. The Chukchi were less receptive. Tikhon Semushkin was a teacher and an ardent communist organizer who traveled to far eastern Siberia to organize indigenous people around the new system.   

The Chukchi were not interested in Semushkin’s description of how “all our people were making a new life, just as Lenin said.” In his memoirs, written some years after arriving in Chukotka, Semushkin describes trying to persuade a Chukchi elder named Tnayrgyn to send nomadic children to boarding school at the cultbaza, or culture base, in the Soviet settlement of Lavrentiya. Pointing to a portrait of Lenin, Semushkin explained “how he that we see hanging on the wall taught that all peoples will live well only when they themselves make their own lives,” by learning to read. Tnayrgyn responded, “What you say is nonsense. Doesn’t he know we make our own lives for ourselves?”

Tnayrgyn’s was a common sentiment among the Chukchi. In 1927, the secretary of the reëstablished Chukotka Revkom tried to organize elected leaders among the Chukchi, but he was told that they had no “chiefs” and were “all equal,” at least over time. And no one wanted to discuss reindeer. The Chukchi, who had begun domesticating reindeer hundreds of years before the Soviets arrived, knew that the animals helped increase the native human population and boosted political power, allowing individuals to amass wealth in herds of thousands. “The Chukchi received me warmly and willingly talked about general, abstract themes and topics that did not directly concern their livestock,” a Revkom committee member reported. “But when issues began to touch on the deer and reindeer herding, the Chukchi became wary and stopped talking.”

Resistance to communist life led to violence and decades of suffering for the Chukchi, and the vast destruction of their reindeer herds. Read about that struggle at The New Yorker. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: Scarborough-Billett)

When asked how they met, Judy and Jerry Griffin told people they met at Woodstock, but they never had any evidence, lending the story the air of a tall tale. But two months ago, they were told they were seen in the trailer for the PBS documentary Woodstock: Three Days that Defined a Generation. Now they have proof, as seen in the image above that they recreated for People magazine.

Judy met Jerry on Aug. 15, 1969 — day one of the iconic Woodstock music festival — when her car broke down on New York’s Tappan Zee Bridge, roughly 90 miles from the concert grounds, and she and the two acquaintances she was traveling with decided to hitchhike.

“I was just thinking, ‘Damn, now we can’t go,’ and we were dying to,” recalls Judy, 71. “Then Jerry and his friends pulled up. I stuck my head in and I saw that there was a woman in the car. I’d never hitchhiked before, but I figured, ‘Well, since there was a woman, it was fairly safe, and I probably should just get in the car.’ “

In that moment Jerry, who was caravanning to the festival with a group of friends in two VW Beetles, thought his luck had definitely changed for the better.

“I thought, ‘Okay, this is definitely unusual. We just picked up this really cute girl. And I’m going to Woodstock and I’ve got a tent and she doesn’t,’ ” says Jerry, 72, with a laugh.

Judy and Jerry Griffin got married and are still together 50 years later, with two sons and five grandchildren. Read more of their story at People. -via reddit

See also: Woodstock Lovers Still Together.

Crab rangoon is a staple of American Chinese cuisine, found in restaurants all over the country. It is essentially cream cheese wrapped in a fried wonton, with a small amount of imitation crab and sometimes sugar. It is named after the city of Yangon in Myanmar, which used to be Rangoon in Burma. But cream cheese is not a common food in Myanmar, nor in China, and imitation crab comes from Japan. So how did this appetizer end up in American Chinese restaurants? You might be surprised to learn.

Crab rangoon has its roots in another quintessentially American cuisine. Starting in the 1940s, thanks to returning World War II veterans, the country began a decades-long obsession with the aquamarine hues and tropical vibes of Polynesia, or at least a vague idea of what Polynesia might be. It manifested as what we know as tiki culture.

The history of crab rangoon is entwined with the history of both tiki culture and American Chinese restaurants, and is an example of fusion food that is altogether American. You can read that story at Atlas Obscura.

Donna Ferguson went from Mississippi to Cancun, Mexico, to get knee replacement surgery. This is an example of "medical tourism," which Americans are familiar with, as medical procedures are much less expensive in other countries. But in this case, it was not only the patient who traveled, but her doctor, too! Orthopedic surgeon Dr. Thomas Parisi flew to Cancun from Wisconsin to meet Ferguson. And Ferguson's medical insurance paid for it.

Ferguson gets her health coverage through her husband’s employer, Ashley Furniture Industries. The cost to Ashley was less than half of what a knee replacement in the United States would have been. That’s why its employees and dependents who use this option have no out-of-pocket copayments or deductibles for the procedure; in fact, they receive a $5,000 payment from the company, and all their travel costs are covered.

Parisi, who spent less than 24 hours in Cancun, was paid $2,700, or three times what he would get from Medicare, the largest single payer of hospital costs in the United States. Private health plans and hospitals often negotiate payment schedules using the Medicare reimbursement rate as a floor.

At least one American business has sprung up to arrange these cost-saving trips for a fee, which is also covered by the insurance companies. Read about medical tourism on steroids at Kaiser Health News. -via TYWKIWDBI

(Image credit: Rocco Saint-Mleux/KHN CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

Star Wars movies are released in December in order to sell toys. And they are starting to be rolled out for the year's film, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. Mattel, in collaboration with Lucasfilm, has announced Star Wars™ X Barbie®, a series of Barbie dolls dressed in classic Star Wars fashion. Only one is a somewhat faithful rendering of a character: Princess Leia, in her white dress from A New Hope. The others are styled as Darth Vader and R2D2, although they are female fashion dolls. The dolls were designed by Robert Best, who discusses his creations at the Barbie blog. The Barbies will ship in November, and can be pre-ordered now at $100 each. Between the 1977 imagery and the price, one would not expect Santa Claus to leave these out for children.  -via Geeks Are Sexy

A guy who goes by the moniker Droogie told a story at the DEF CON hacking conference in Las Vegas recently about his license plate. He requested and received a vanity plate that displayed NULL. If you recall the tale of Null Island, you know this can cause some problems. Droogie knew this, too, and expected it. What he expected was that the computerized system of the DMV wouldn't be able to link any parking tickets to his car. But instead, he got his own and everyone else's tickets.

It seemed that a privately operated citation processing center had a database of outstanding tickets, and, for some reason — possibly due to incomplete data on their end — many of those tickets were assigned to the license plate "NULL." In other words, the processing center was likely trying to tell its systems it didn't know the plates of the offending cars. Instead, with Droogie's vanity plate now in play, it pegged all those outstanding tickets on him.

Read the rest of the story at Mashable.

(Image credit: Jack Morse/Mashable)