There have been many tales of ghosts in the executive mansion in Washington, but the one that set the staff on edge during the Taft administration became the subject of a White House cover up. President Taft's personal assistant, Major Archie Butt, told the story to his sister-in-law in a letter, which is the only surviving written account of the ghost that terrified the household staff in 1911. This ghost made his presence known by touching people on the shoulder.

Several of the White House staff reported feeling this mysterious pressure on their shoulder, only to turn around to an empty room. Just one member of the household, though, said she actually saw the ghost. Marsh, First Lady Helen Taft’s personal maid, reported not just feeling the ghost leaning over her shoulder, but seeing the ethereal figure, whom she described as a young boy with light, unkempt hair and sad blue eyes. “Now who on Earth this can be,” Butt mused, “I cannot imagine.”

Taft responded to news of the spooky rumor with “towering rage,” Butt said, banning anyone in the house from speaking of the ghost under threat of firing. The president worried that the story would get out and the press would have a field day with the news. But his aide seemed to have a sense of humor about the whole situation. “I reminded him that the help was in such a state of mind that, if it was positively believed that the upper floor of the White House was haunted, the servants there could not be kept in their places by executive order,” Butt wrote.

Although Butt wasn't afraid of any ghost, he did investigate the reports. Read about "The Thing" that haunted the White House at Mental Floss.

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They say that Penny is a smart dog, but why can't she put the letters in the right order from left -to-right instead of piling them on top of each other? Oh yeah, because she's a dog, and you don't expect dogs to be able to spell in the first place. What Penny is doing is a trained response, but a spectacularly well done one. -via Tastefully Offensive

The 2017 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine has been awarded to three American scientists who identified genes and proteins that regulate our biological clocks. Jeffrey C. Hall, Michael W. Young, and Michael Rosbash worked with fruit flies for decades to crack the code. 

In 1984, Rosbash and Hall, working at Brandeis University in Boston, and Young at Rockefeller University in New York isolated a gene they called "period", which controlled the expression of a protein called PER. They saw that PER builds up during the hours of night, and dissipates again in daytime, so the levels oscillated over a 24-hour cycle, the basis of the "circadian rhythm" or body clock.

Importantly, they also discovered that when PER builds up in the cell, it turns off "period". So it is a self-regulating mechanism. "That was the key fundamental breakthrough," said Russell. "The appreciation of a molecular feedback loop – a gene encodes a protein which feeds back and inhibits the gene's own expression."

It wasn't clear how PER could influence its own expression, since it was unable to bind to DNA. But in 1994, Young also discovered another gene-protein pair, "timeless" and TIM, which was the missing link. He also found a third, "doubletime" and DBT, which helped control the 24-hour period.

Michael Rosbash describes the irony of the middle-of-the-night phone call he got from Stockholm that disturbed his sleep cycle.  

You can read more about this research, and keep up with other Nobel Prizes as they are awarded, at the Nobel Prize website.

If you are a horror movie fan and subscribe to one (or more) of the many streaming services like Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, or HBO, you are in for a great October. The hard part is deciding how to want to use your embarrassment of riches. You can select a new movie (or two) for every evening. You can spend a weekend (or two) smuggled up with your significant other binge-watching until you are a quivering mass of fear. Or you can plan a Halloween party with a film festival theme and invite all your friends! Check out the list of the 31 Best Streaming Horror Movies at Den of Geek.

For most of us, the charm of cold weather can be enjoyed only because we know there will be an end to it next spring. But if you really hate fresh fruit and lawn mowing and swimming pools, if you prefer polar bears to penguins, there are places above the Arctic Circle you can go and live. And there are places even further north that you can't, unless you are assigned to duty there.  

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Half as Interesting gives us a short delightfully snarky tour of the world's most northern settlements and how you might want to join them. We also learn how to pronounce Thule. -via Laughing Squid

The 1996 movie Space Jam will forever mark the generation of people who were children when it was released. They love it; no one else does. The film featured a disparate cast of characters that included NBA stars, animated Looney Tunes characters, and Bill Murray. There are aliens from outer space, too. If this cavalcade of weirdness is part of your childhood, you'll want to learn some trivia about the movie.

9. Michael Jordan had his own basketball court.

Jordan was actually given his own court to shoot on between takes.

8. It’s the first animated film to be edited for content.

There’s no really bad language in Space Jam, I mean come on it’s a kid’s cartoon. But when Daffy Duck says “We’re getting screwed” that was deemed to be too much for TV and it was cut out.

Read the rest of the trivia list about Space Jam at TVOM.

It seems like just yesterday when we found out the Lunarbaboon family was going to welcome another child, and now she's old enough to have role models. I can attest to the importance of role models for little girls. Every time we met a woman pediatrician, she'd soon find another position in a larger city. So my youngest decided she wanted to grow up to be a waitress, because that's the job she saw women doing. Luckily, she discovered Jane Goodall during grade school. This is the latest comic from Lunarbaboon.

The following is an article from Uncle John's Bathroom Reader The World's Gone Crazy.

More than 50 years ago, a group of experienced skiers met a gruesome end on a snowy mountain range. And to this day, no one knows for sure what happened to them.

INTREPID EXPLORERS

In January 1959, 23-year-old Igor Dyatlov led a group of 10 college students from the Ural Polytechnic Institute on a two-week cross-country ski trek across the northern Ural mountains of Russia (then the Soviet Union). To reach their destination, the eight men and two women first had to ski over a mountain pass known as Kholat Syakhl. In the language of the Mansi people native to the area, the name means “Mountain of the Dead.” But as far as Dyatlov’s team was concerned, that was just folklore.

Just three days into the trip, one of the members, Yuri Yudin, felt sick, so he left the group and returned home. The remaining nine continued on… and no one ever saw them alive again.

Tyler Hudson looks at life through the eyes of his dog Mosby. Mosby's got life all figured out, and it's a pretty cool life.

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To be honest, there's a lot we can learn from our pets. They take life as it comes, they don't stress, they're just happy. That's because they have one thing we don't have: someone who loves them who will always take care of them. And they trust in that. -via Tastefully Offensive 

(Image credit: Flickr user Dennis Skley)

The following is an article from the book Uncle John's Weird, Weird World: EPIC.

The calendar may say Friday the 13th, but remember, there is good luck as well as bad luck waiting for us out there. More proof that this weird, weird world of ours works in mysterious ways…

HANGNAIL

Jan Madsen was fixing the roof of his home outside of Berlin when he tripped and started sliding toward the roof’s edge. As he scrambled to grab onto anything that might prevent his fall, Madsen’s nail gun accidentally went off and shot him through the knee. It was excruciatingly painful, but the nail pinned his leg to a wooden support beam and held him there until rescue workers arrived an hour later to free him.

BABY SAVES THE DAY

The John C. Hodges Library at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville has a centaur on exhibit, displayed as it was found in an archeological dig. J.W. Ocker had to go see it.  

The exhibit was of a half-excavated horse-man skeleton in a death pose, like you’d see at a natural history museum for one of the smaller dinosaurs. Embedded around it were shards of ceramic pottery. On the other side of the display were more shards of pottery, each one bearing distinct shapes reminiscent of the hooved humans. A placard explained the history of centaurs, their culture, and how this skeleton was one of three that had been pulled from the muck near Volos, Greece, causing historians and biologists and LARPers to rethink the mythical status of the creature.

We don't know how many former and current UT students have even noticed the exhibit at the library, or how many assume it to be a scientific exhibit instead of an art installation. It's called The Centaur Excavations at Volos, and it was built by artist and biology professor Bill Willers in 1980 (with real bones). UT purchased it a few years later, and it's been on display in the library ever since. Read about the exhibit and see more pictures at OTIS.

(Image credit: J.W. Ocker)

National Geographic Explorer Jonathan Kolby was in the jungle in Honduras researching amphibians when he spotted a spider with a spectacular rear end. The spider (Micrathena sagittata) is red, except for an abdomen that resembles the head of the Pokémon character Pikachu. It's not a rare species, just tiny and hard to spot even if you're looking for them. But why the coloring that acts like a safety vest? A 2002 experiment on similarly colored spider in Australia hints that standing out actually attracts prey.  

Using a black marker, the researchers "erased" the spiders' bright yellow color. The spiders whose colors had been thus muted were on average less successful at catching prey. Like arrow-shaped micrathenas, the Australian spiders are "sit-and-wait" predators that ensnare prey in large webs.

Maybe when insects see this, they don't think "Pikachu" as much as they think "flower." Read more about the PIkachu spider at National Geographic News.

(Image credit: Jonathan Kolby)

George Hendrik Breitner was a Dutch Impressionist painter, a contemporary of Van Gogh, who he painted alongside in France for a while. Breitner began taking photographs to use as a reference for his paintings, but also used photography itself as an art medium.

Like his paintings, Breitner’s photos are concerned less with sharpness and fidelity than with motion and atmosphere.

The haphazard snaps never seem still, recording huddled and hurried pedestrians in the rain, the play of light on cobblestones, and the endless rush of working people from one task to another.

See a collection of Breitner's photographs of Amsterdam from the Dutch National Museum, taken between 1890 and 1910, at Mashable.

The latest video from AsapSCIENCE gives us some tips on how to learn something faster. The secret is to knwo what is meant by "learning." Sure, you can study in a hurry, but you want to understand the subject, or master the task, not just get through the book. You want to make that knowledge your own.

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Lucky for us, there has been quite a bit of research on the subject of effective learning. Quite a few tips are about involving your whole body, not just your eyes and brain. Study and practice efficiently, and you'll find it comes faster than it would otherwise.  -via Geeks Are Sexy 

When his younger brother assassinated President Lincoln, Edwin Booth's career as an actor was over. He immediately retired at the height of his popularity, but more than 20 years later, he found another claim to fame when he founded The Players, a private club in New York City. The Players drew the elite of the art world: actors, authors, artists, and celebrities of other stripes. Along the way, the building where it all began has become an archive of relics from the many members who joined during the different eras of the club's long life. It started out as an ambitious project in the exclusively posh area of Grammercy Park in New York City when Booth bought a building in 1888.  

The other, well heeled residents of Gramercy Park were less than thrilled at the prospect of a club for actors being on their doorsteps. For the acting profession in the 1800s was not quite the same as it is today; actors were often seen as louche second class citizens, often not well paid, and involved in a somewhat bawdy profession of dubious morals.

But this was one of Booth’s main aims : to raise the profile and respectability of the acting profession. For number 16, Gramercy Park South was not just to be his home, but a sparkling new, private club for actors set right in one of Manhattan’s most prestigious addresses.

The Players wasn’t created to be a seedy, drinking den for actors; from the beginning, Booth opened membership to all those in society who loved the arts. It was to be a lavish but comfortable clubhouse where actors might mingle with elite Victorian society. It was to be a certain club as Booth put it, “for the promotion of social intercourse between the representative members of the dramatic profession and the kindred spirits of literature, painting, sculpture and music, and the patrons of the arts.’ Founder members included such high calibre names as Mark Twain to General Sherman.

The club is still thriving in the same place it opened more than a hundred years ago. Take a look inside The Players, including Edwin Booth's private apartment, which is kept under lock and key, and exists exactly as it did when he died there in 1893, at Messy Messy Chic.

(Image credit: Beyond My Ken) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Players_Club.jpg