Rowena Matthews graduated from Radcliffe, worked for a Nobel Prize-winning scientist, and earned a PhD in biophysics from the University of Michigan. She also married a medical student and had two boys …all in the 1960s. That was unusual, but it got her more than 15 minutes of fame when Tang searched for someone to appear in a TV commercial.   

In 1972, Matthews was a postdoctoral researcher in U-M’s Department of Biological Chemistry when she received an unexpected call from her department chair. He explained that a friend who worked in advertising was looking for a female scientist with a doctorate and two children.

“I was the only woman he knew who fit the requirements,” says Matthews, who sons were 8 and 2 at the time.

While almost everything about the commercial seems humdrum and all-American today, the fact that its main character was a young, female scientist was decidedly noteworthy, Matthews points out. At the time, her life was not well represented in popular culture.

“That was the era of ring-around-the-collar. You know, women in commercials who would hold up the laundry and show how proud they were of how clean it was,” she explains. “So, to me, these Tang commercials were not just good for the company, they were wonderful for women. Here were women who were scientists and mothers. I just thought that was revolutionary.”

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So Rowena Matthews and her sons became the face of Tang that so many people remember. What happened to her after that? When she finished her studies, she ran into problems finding a permanent position that didn't involve uprooting her husband (who had his own career) and children. Now retired, Williams tells her story at the University of Michigan Life Sciences Institute website. -via Metafilter

The new film Battle of the Sexes (starring Emma Stone and Steven Carell above) tells the story of the 1973 tennis match between former tennis star Bobby Riggs and 29-year-old Billie Jean King. King had worked for years already to elevate the sport of tennis. She campaigned for the U.S. Open, Wimbledon, and the French Open to become professional events. When Wimbledon did in 1968, King was aghast to learn that the men's winner received £2,000, while she only got £750 for winning the women's division. King then dedicated herself to parity for women in sports. When Riggs bragged that women's tennis was inferior and that at age 55, he could beat any of the top woman in tennis, she knew it was a publicity stunt, but it rubbed her the wrong way.

Initially, King didn’t want to participate in the Battle, but after top-ranked player Margaret Court (played by Jessica McNamee) lost to Riggs in the “Mother’s Day Massacre,” King felt it was necessary. Not only had the loss given fuel to Riggs’ sexist insults, she was worried about what effect the diminishment of women’s tennis might have on Title IX. The legislation, passed only a year earlier and still the subject of debate, was essential to women athletes receiving scholarships and equal opportunities. “Billie Jean King is a very far thinking person who sees the big picture,” explains Jentsch. “She wasn't alone in seeing Title IX’s importance, but she really understood it would mean a lot for female athletes in the future.”

Explaining her reasoning behind accepting Riggs’ challenge, she later said, “I thought it would set us back 50 years if I didn’t win that match. It would ruin the women’s [tennis] tour and affect all women’s self-esteem. To beat a 55-year-old guy was no thrill for me. The thrill was exposing a lot of new people to tennis.”

The movie only scratches the surface of what Billie Jean King did for the sport of tennis, which you can read at Smithsonian. Incidentally, the four major tournaments eventually all awarded the same prize money to men and women …in 2007.

Régina and Yvonne Baranton were foot jugglers. Watch them display their talents on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1969.

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You have to wonder how and why they ever decided they were going to juggle tables with their feet. It's not the kind of thing that everyone wanted to do, even in the weird 1960s. It turns out they came by their act naturally -from the family. A French circus family. You can see the Baranton Trio performing on French TV in 1958. And the tradition lives on. Another family member, Eliane Baranton, performs in this video labeled 2009. -via TYWKIWDBI

Buda Castle is the crown jewel of Budapest, Hungary, and was the traditional home of Hungarian kings. The castle sits on top of a six-mile series of caves that have quite a history. During World War II, the caves were used as air-raid shelters and an underground hospital was installed. It was called Sziklakorhaz, or The Hospital in the Rock.   

At the start of World War II, the location served as a single-room air raid center, but operating theaters, corridors, and wards were quickly added to create a much-needed hospital. By early 1944, the hospital had officially opened inside the cave, tending to wounded Hungarian and Nazi soldiers. After less than a year of operation, the facility found itself facing its largest challenge—the Siege of Budapest, which lasted seven weeks and was eventually won by Allied forces on their way to Berlin.

As one of the few area hospitals still operational, the Hospital in the Rock was well over capacity during the siege. Originally built to treat around 70 patients, close to 700 ended up crammed into the claustrophobic caves. The wounded lay three to a bed—if they were lucky enough to get a bed at all. Unsurprisingly, heat from all those bodies raised the ambient temperature to around 95°F, and smoking cigarettes was the number one way to pass the time. Add that to the putrid mix of death, decay, and infection and you’ve got an incredibly unpleasant wartime cocktail.

Hungary fell under Soviet control after the war, and the Hospital in the Rock was designated top secret. The Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, but the top secret designation was not removed from the hospital until just a few years ago. Now we know what happened during that time. Read about the secret history of the Hospital in the Rock at Mental Floss.

(Image credit: Globetrotter19)

Bini (previously at Neatorama) has many hobbies, such as painting and doing tricks for his human. He likes to play a little basketball before he goes to bed every night.  

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The folks at Guinness World Records have recognized Bini's talents with a world record for "most slam dunks in one minute by a rabbit." Seven of them. Yeah, sure, it's a made-up category for Bini, but it's still amazing. It got the rabbit into the book Guinness World Records 2018: Amazing Animals. This is the first edition, so who knows? Maybe some other bunny will come along and challenge that record. -via Tastefully Offensive

Haruko Hiratsuka (Raichō), Yoshiko Yasumochi, and Kazuko Mozume founded a women's literary magazine in 1911. It was named Seitō, which translated to Bluestocking, and was targeted to a slowly growing population of educated young Japanese women. Seitō was a hit from its very first printing, and drew widespread interest among the women who bought it and suspicion from their skeptical family members. Although the very idea of a literary magazine for women was radical at the time, the articles were not -at first. But the content evolved to meet the needs of its audience.

Women’s feelings and inner thoughts, however, turned out to be a provocative challenge to the social and legal strictures of this era, when a woman’s role was to be a good wife and mother. The Seitō women imagined much wider and wilder emotional and professional lives for themselves. They fell in love, they indulged in alcohol, they built careers as writers, and they wrote about it all—publicly. The stories were radical enough that the government censored them. The story that prompted policemen to visit the magazine’s office late at night was a piece of fiction about a married women writing to her lover to ask him to meet her while her husband was away.

As they attracted public attention and disapproval, instead of shying away from the controversy they’d created, the editors of Seitō were forced to confront more baldly political questions, and this in turn earned them more banned issues. In the pages of their magazine they came to debate women’s equality, chastity, and abortion. Without originally intending to, they became some of Japan’s pioneering feminists.

The magazine caused outrage when one of the founders wrote about making a cocktail, when several writers visited the brothel, and when they advocated for women's suffrage. Read about the groundbreaking magazine Seitō at Atlas Obscura.

You can see in this graphic from Denmark that mobile phones have changed a lot over the years. The first mobile phones in the 1970s were innovative but huge. By the '90s, people were using mobile phones you could hold in one hand. And they got smaller -up to a point. Around the turn of the century, phones started getting larger again. Why? Because they were no longer "just" phones. The miniaturization of tech allowed us to cram an entire range of gadgets into one device, so the addition of a video screen meant it had to be large enough to see. The limit of miniaturization is not tech, but our physical bodies that use it. The growth of the devices since then makes them ever easier to see, while the components inside continue to shrink. Read about the evolution of mobile phones at Blazepress. -via Nag on the Lake

The Princess Bride has a cornucopia of elements that make it one of our favorite movies. But the overarching theme is true love. Every character has something to say about it.  

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In this cute video that seems shorter than it is, the Gregory Brothers songify the lines from The Princess Bride to make a love song about love..  true wuv. This is their contribution to the celebratio of the movie's 30th anniversary. -via Tastefully Offensive

We all know that the earth is a disc carried on the back of a turtle. There are supposed to be four elephants in there, too, but maybe they are just covered with mud. This real-life turtle is carrying his share of earth, that's for sure! There's even a poem about it.

"See the TURTLE of Enormous Girth"
"On his shell he holds the Earth."
"His thought is slow, but always kind."
"He holds us all within his mind."

You might try to guess how this turtle ended up with the earth on its back, so redditor assa7iq did some digging.

Right? Everyone's just making jokes and I want to learn how this happens. I'm asking my herpetologist friend.

Edit - answers! I asked how this happens-

"Some turtles can hibernate for a year. Not all, but some. Probably long term hibernation. He probably had a little cavern of some sort. And due to the soil moisture it collapsed on him as he was getting out."

Then I asked if there's any good reason to leave all that on him-

"No good reason, no. He probably just woke up and has a tortoise bedhead. (If anything it's bad, because it lowers the amount of surface area is hit by sunlight for basking)"

Tortoise bedhead is more reasonable than the flat earth theory. -via reddit

We've all been there: Deliver a joke, some little bit of unexpected humor… or so you think. But it falls flat (hey, at least it rhymes). That's bad enough even without the diss that follows. I had to laugh, even though I also felt sorry for Gary. The caption under this comic from Jake Likes Onions is "Gary just wants to be liked."

I don't name my houseplants because I have a bazillion of them. But we had shrubs named Bob and Steve. Bob died last year, so I think his replacement will be named Gary.

Grant Wood's American Gothic is more than a famous painting. Sure, it's a great piece of art, but there's more to it than that. When it was first unveiled, the painting wasn't recognized as anything special. But the subject matter made it something worth talking about.   

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In this video from Vox, we see that it was the people who saw the painting that made it special. They saw what they wanted to see in American Gothic. -via Digg

See also: The Story Behind American Gothic.

Christian Gudebrod ran the The Gudebrod Brothers Silk Company, Inc. at the building now called Bleecker Tower in New York City. The business had a shop cat named Snooperkatz that Gudebrod was particularly fond of. When Snooperkatz went missing in May of 1894, Gudebrod posted flyers offering a one dollar reward for the return of his lost cat.

Unfortunately, nobody returned Snooperkatz. However, every man, woman, and child who saw the flyer brought Christian Gudebrod multiple street cats in hopes of getting the dollar reward.

As The Sun reported on May 11, 1894, within just a few days, the large building was overrun with cats, “raising their voices in a stream of profanity that is dark, deep and strong.” There were “black cats, white cats, gray cats, yellow cats, mottled cats, tomcats, pussy cats, tailless cats, earless cats, whiskerless cats, cats of high caste, and cats of absolutely no caste at all!”

Apparently the people who brought the cats were not too keen on taking them back where they found them. Anyway, the story made the newspapers, and The Sun sent a reporter to interview Gudebrod about the incident. Gudebrod told many tales about the mischievous and often downright devilish Snooperkatz, which you can read at The Hatching Cat. -via Strange Company

Disney's Donald Duck has been around for more than 80 years, and has appeared in more movies than any other Disney character. Donald and his extensive family have always been ahead of their time. How else would we have so many great things that were first seen in cartoons and comics featuring Donald, his Uncle Scrooge, or his nephews Huey, Dewey, and Louie? For example, you might recall the 2010 movie Inception. It was considered groundbreaking, but we'd already seen it in the comics.    

In a 2002 comic book, eight years before Christopher Nolan's little dream exploration film, Scrooge got his mind hijacked by the Beagle Boys. The Boys were trying out new careers as dream-thieves and went into Scrooge's mind to steal the secret combination of his vault. If this sounds vaguely familiar, it's because that's exactly how Inception opens up, except you have to replace DiCaprio with talking dogs. Which, incidentally, would probably improve every single one of his movies.

After they're inside Scrooge's mind, the Beagle Boys have trouble differentiating dreams from reality -- again, exactly like the characters from Inception, who need special items, or "totems" in order to tell dream from reality.

When Donald Duck enters Scrooge's dream to help, he has to figure out a way to pry the Beagle Boys out of there. In Inception they use "kicks" to make controlled exits, like how the feeling of falling usually snaps you out of the dream. In McDuck's head, they do, well, the exact same thing.

There's more to the story about Inception, plus several other ways that the Ducks were either prescient or else they inspired something that came after. Read about five of them at Cracked. -Thanks, Tim!

In the newest episode of Simon's Cat Logic, Simon Tofield and Nicky Treverrow talks about how cats play, and the best ways for us to play with them. It starts with how to train kittens in recognizing the proper toys.

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Even after a lifetime of playing with cats, even I learned some new tips in this video. It has a Simon's Cat cartoon tagged onto the end, in which we see the cat having a ball with that elusive red dot.

The Catholic Church ruled both the spiritual and physical lives of Europeans during the period of the Holy Roman Empire. Then Martin Luther began the Protestant Reformation, leading to formation of the Lutheran Church. Other breakaway groups founded other denominations with theologies that wandered further from Catholic doctrine. In some places, that led to war, because one's salvation was not to be trusted to free will, and neither was political power. In the city of Münster, a gruesome artifact reminds citizens of those dark days.

Visitors to St. Lambert’s church in Münster, Germany may notice something odd about the building’s facade. Three gleaming iron cages, 7 feet tall and a yard wide and deep, hang empty from the church spire. Once home to the mutilated bodies of three revolutionaries who shaped one of the strangest chapters in the Protestant Reformation, the cages have hung there for nearly 500 years. They remain on the spire as a testament to their former occupants’ experiment in religious utopia—and the tremors they sent through German religious and political life for years after their occupants' deaths.

The citizens of Münster held relatively liberal religious views in 1530. To the local bishop, their tolerance of Protestants was radical and even heretical and, worst of all, threatened his power. The Lutherans moved in, and then the Anabaptists, and neither takeover was peaceful. Over the next six years, the city was a battleground between the sects. The war took odd turns with forced baptisms, polygamy, famine, torture, prophesy, and violent battles. Read an account of the bizarre war in Münster that ended with the public cages that still hang there, at Mental Floss.

(Image credit: Flixckr user ptwo)