There are plenty of places you can visit that are named as portals to Hades for one reason or another. It could be that they are really scary, or have a legend behind them, or someone thought that title would be good for tourism. And they were right! “The Gates of Hell” are found all over the world: Greece, Iceland, China, Italy, the US, Turkey, Ireland, Japan, and in Belize, as pictured above. This location has a truly terrifying history.

There is a cave network located in modern-day Belize, which the Mayans believed was an entrance to their underworld: Xibalba.

The name Actun Tunichil Muknal translates as "Cave of the Crystal Sepulchre." Extensive research has linked the site, located in the Tapir Mountain Nature Reserve, to ancient Mayan legends. These stories described rivers of blood and scorpions, and a vast subterranean labyrinth ruled over by the Mayan death gods, the demonic "Lords of Xibalba."

Since their rediscovery in 1989, the caves of Actun Tunichil Muknal have become a popular destination for explorers. There are numerous landmarks that make this network particularly interesting, including a vast chamber of stalactites known as the "Cathedral."

Amongst scattered fragments of pottery and bone, one of the more notable discoveries is the skeleton of an 18-year-old girl. Believed to have been ritualistically murdered in the cave as a sacrifice to the Death Gods, she has been nicknamed the "Crystal Maiden"; over the 1,000 years since her death, her bones have calcified to create a shimmering, crystal effect.

She’s not the only human sacrifice still visible in Actun Tunichil Muknal. Read more about it, and ten other places known as the gates of hell (not all of them as scary), at Atlas Obscura. This article is part of their 31 Days of Halloween series they do every year.  

(Image credit: Peter Andersen)

A movie Director, A writer for Marvel, and a Manga writer collaborate on an empowering female protagonist. pic.twitter.com/6XVP7QrZ64

— HistorocityoNazareth (@ILLCapitano94) October 2, 2016

(video link)

How do you construct a strong female character? You get a roomful of guys to collaborate. @ILLCapitano94 is all of those men in this sketch. You can keep them straight by the shirt color, but it’s not really necessary. This goes fast, and it’s funny. But the language may be NSFW, depending on your workplace. -via Digg

China has some amazing new buildings that are meant to serve a huge population and create a distinctive skyline at the same time. Oh yeah, every municipal government wants to be recognized as easily as Sydney. Just look at the new Harbin Opera House, sure to become an iconic symbol.  

The Harbin Opera House is a new addition to the Chinese collection of architectural wonders, completed in 2015. It is a 7,900 square meter structure that is designed to imitate the curves of the landscape in which it is located near the Songhua River. The surface is textured with glass pyramids for allowing more light to enter through the ceiling. Smooth waves of architectural structure give it a futuristic look. The building was designed by MAD architects.

Landscape? What I see is a wise old Jedi in a robe talking to his young Padawan. See more images of recent Chinese architecture, from traditional to stunningly modern, at Housely.

Neatorama is proud to bring you a guest post from Ernie Smith, the editor of Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail. In another life, he ran ShortFormBlog.

Controversial literature that lives at the very edge of the First Amendment plays an important societal role: It tests exactly what we can say.

In the age of the internet, it’s easier than ever to get one’s hand on information that touches the very edge of the First Amendment’s limits. (We are by no means recommending you do that. Stick to Disney.com.) But before that, if you wanted to tell someone how to make a bomb in the kitchen of your mom—as an al-Qaeda magazine once infamously put it—it came down to literature. And sometimes this literature has pushed the edges of good taste and societal norms, but still these documents remain out there in the world, inspiring more book-burnings than a Harry Potter convention. Today, we talk about controversial literature.

Editor’s note: This issue tackles a bunch of controversial literature from a sociological point of view. In case you need us to spell this out: we don’t condone the views being discussed in some of these works; rather, we’re discussing their cultural and political impact.

Complaints about books

The American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom was informed 5,000 times of challenges to books in schools and libraries between 2000 and 2009. Books of all kinds—from popular modern authors such as John Green and Stephen Chbosky, to classics written by J.D. Salinger and Harper Lee—have been challenged over the years for reasons related to their content and whether the works are suitable for students. The most popular banned book of 2015 was John Green's Looking for Alaska.

The obscure publisher that lives on the edge of decency

The following is an article from The Annals of Improbable Research, now in all-pdf form. Get a subscription now for only $25 a year!

Ig Nobel Achievements distilled into limerick form
by Martin Eiger, Improbable Research Limerick Laureate

The Ig Nobel Prizes honor achievements that first make people LAUGH, then make them THINK. For details of all the Ig Nobel Prize-winning achievements, see each year’s special Ig Nobel issue of the magazine, and also see the winners page.

2011 Ig Nobel Chemistry Prize
The prize was awarded to Makoto Imai, Naoki Urushihata, Hideki Tanemura, Yukinobu Tajima, Hideaki Goto, Koichiro Mizoguchi, and Junichi Murakami for determining the ideal density of airborne wasabi (pungent horseradish) to awaken sleeping people in case of a fire or other emergency, and for applying this knowledge to invent the wasabi alarm.

It is airborne wasabi’s propensity,
Due to its pungent intensity,
To shield you from harm.
You won’t buy the farm
As long as it has the right density.

We are aware of the ongoing struggle between the heart and the brain, but there are other organs that can throw a wrench into our perception of the world around us. Heart and Brain are discussing the morning news when Bowels has a gut feeling. And you know what happens when the gut feeling wins out over brains… that’s how you get killer clowns! Not to mention nasty political campaigns. This is the latest from Nick Seluk at The Awkward Yeti.

A couple of months ago, we introduced you to the blog McMansion Hell, which now goes by the name Worst of McMansions. The blogger is an architect who explains the various sins of McMansion design and how they offend our sense of proportion, balance, flow, and continuity. The descriptions of these houses reminded Colin Dickey of something much earlier: haunted houses. Long before the term “McMansion” was coined, we already had plenty of haunted houses described in literature. In book after book, the authors describe houses that seem eerie because they lack order or harmony.    

The archetypal American haunted house has always been one whose construction was aesthetically unbalanced. Take one of the most famous American haunted houses, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s house of the seven gables. Defined by its “seven acutely peaked gables, facing towards various points of the compass, and a huge, clustered chimney in the midst,” the house is the ill-gotten gains of Colonel Pyncheon, who accuses his neighbor Matthew Maule of witchcraft in order to acquire his land. There is no order or symmetry to the house; indeed, it’s not even clear where the front of the house is, since it lacks any kind of façade or welcoming front door. The titular, odd-numbered gables poke out in different directions, overwhelming the house with secondary masses and voids. A McMansion 150 years before the term was invented, Hawthorne’s creation set the template for a house that exemplifies wealth without class, ostentation without order.

That’s just the beginning of the comparisons of famous haunted houses and McMansions, and even includes a modern horror story built around a McMansion, that you can read about at Slate.  -via Digg

(Image credit: John Martz)

Is the same guy time-traveling and trying to avoid meeting himself? Or did the replicator stop sorting people into different spaces properly? Just how did three bald white guys in bright blue polo shirts and glasses end up catching up on work at the same cafe? My theory is that it’s a hot place, so they all shaved their heads (which is right, it’s Bangkok), and they work at the same nearby company that has a dress code and won’t give their tech guys a private office. This eerie image was snapped by redditor oldmontgomeryflange, who did not mention his hairstyle or what he was wearing at the time. -via Boing Boing

This is what happens when you plant trees in a very windy place, where the winds blow 24/7 all year ‘round. The trees cannot win that war, yet these managed to survive by bending and twisting to the unrelenting wind.

This is Slope Point. It is the southernmost tip on New Zealand's South Island. The airstreams loop the vast circumpolar Southern Ocean unobstructed for 2000 miles and then they smash into land. Here. They are so persistent and so violent that the trees are perpetually warped and twisted into these crooked, windswept shapes.

Under natural conditions, tree seeds would never get past the sprout stage here, but New Zealand sheep farmers planted saplings to give their sheep a bit of shelter from the wind. Read about Slope Point and see more pictures of its trees at Kuriositas.  -via the Presurfer

(Image credit: Flickr user Anita Gould)

Did you know that synchronized indoor skydiving was a thing? It just goes to show that any human activity, new or old, will be made into a competition. This competition resembles an anti-gravity chorus line. The 1st FAI World Indoor Skydiving Championship was held last fall in Prague, Czech Republic. This is the performance of the Czech team called the Mad Ravens.  

(YouTube link)

Despite the home country advantage, they came in second in their event. -via Digg

Prescription drugs marketed directly to consumers is a weird idea, but it works -for pharmaceutical companies. People who have no idea about medicine ask their doctor for the latest miracle cure they saw on TV. Doctors, who have way too many patients to see already and don’t want to hear you whine, let you try them out, even if a much cheaper and older drug would do just as much for you. This goes double for antidepressants, as so many people feel unhappy. That doesn’t necessarily mean they have depression, since there’s plenty to be unhappy about in everyday life. But a TV ad promising to make you feel better is really tempting.

(YouTube link)

In another of their series of Honest Ads, Cracked looks at antidepressants that are advertised directly to the public. There are medicines that can help people suffering from depression. But you have to trust a medical professional to determine a diagnosis and treatment. And pharmaceutical salesman are not the professionals to trust in that situation. -via Tastefully Offensive

Su Blackwell bring old books to life by using them to make sculptures of the stories they tell. Her sculptures use the books as both the base and the material used to craft a scene.

While Su appreciates a good read now and then, her vision of books is to take them from the physical and turn them into the almost real.  What Su does is create “fairytale-like” book sculptures by transforming flat pages into three-dimensional objects.  The worlds she creates are amazing, filled with mystery, and incredibly imaginative.  The books Su finds mostly come from second hand book stores and she always reads them before she begins to sculpt.

Blackwell's series entitled Dwellings depicts homes, huts, villages, gardens, and even tree houses from the fairy tale world. These have added illumination to make them even more warm and inviting. See a collection of works from Su Blackwell’s Dwellings at Unreality.

Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, begins at sundown today (October 2) and lasts until sundown on Tuesday. If you celebrate the first of the High Holy Days, you already know that. If you don’t, then you might want to learn something about it.

7. THE SOUNDING OF THE SHOFAR IS THE MOST ICONIC IMAGE OF THIS HOLIDAY.

The shofar is a ram’s horn that is curved and bent. It is hollowed out and blown during religious ceremonies to make three different sounds. Hearing it is meant to call you to repent.

8. WHILE SOME JEWISH HOLIDAYS INVOLVE FASTING, ROSH HASHANAH INVOLVES A FEAST.

It is traditional to eat apples dipped in honey to represent having a sweet year ahead. A round challah bread symbolizes the cycle of the year (another interpretation is that it represents a crown and thus God’s sovereignty). Sometimes a fish, or just its head, is included, possibly to represent that as fish cannot survive without water, Jews cannot survive without the Torah. Pomegranates contain many seeds, which have long been associated with the commandments that Jews follow, so by eating them they remind themselves to be good in the coming year. Other common foods include dates, leeks, gourds, and black-eyed peas, all of which are mentioned in the Talmud as foods to eat on New Year’s.

There’s more about Rosh Hashanah in a list at mental_floss.

(Image credit: Flickr user Elias Punch)

Water rights is a complicated subject in places where water is not plentiful. Does anyone have the right to unlimited water? Cities have more people to serve, but farms grow crops for many people to consume. In Colorado, the water falls on the mountains as snow, then flows down the Colorado River. Meanwhile, the desert east of the Rockies is where more people live, in Denver and other towns.

Ever since the state became a state, its government and our federal one have grappled with how to redistribute the bounty—bankrolling dams, reservoirs, and massive transmountain diversion tunnels, up to 23 miles long. In Colorado, water itself is treated like private equity. Due to the particulars of an antiquated law, the first people to put water to “beneficial use” get dibs. And because pioneers predate almost everybody else, today’s farmers and ranchers control 85 percent of the available water supply. Sustained droughts, depleted aquifers, global warming, and a rapidly growing population have made scarcity the norm. As a result, farmers find themselves sitting on a commodity worth far more than their crops or land.

During the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s, nearly all of the farmers in Crowley County, southeast of Colorado Springs, participated in what are known as “buy and dry” deals, selling their water rights to growing municipalities and retaining the land, albeit unirrigated and unable to support crops. Once farming tapered off, production at the local cannery ground to a halt. Feedlots closed. Mills shuttered.

You could say, tough, you sold those water rights. But unused farmland is not the best use of land. The failure of farms affects the economy of nearby towns. Together, they affect the overall health of the state. Learn about the water rights dilemma in Colorado at Modern Farmer. -via Digg

(Image credit: Matt Nager)

It’s amazing the skills people will develop when they are bored. In Australia, you can learn toad stacking. Here, a fellow from Swamp Garage shows us how to stack three toads.

(YouTube link)

He says,

Safety tip: Toads are poisonous! Do not accidentally eat them whilst performing this experiment! Also, you can't use things like glue or a toothpick. That's cheating. And cruel. Happy toad stacking!

We assumed they were dangerous, because this is in Australia. And the toads say,

ɹǝ˙˙˙˙˙˙˙sıǝʍ˙˙˙˙˙˙˙pnq

-via reddit