People often think of armadillos as merely speed bumps in the road, but Frank has a personality all his own. Frank lives at Animal Tracks, a sanctuary for rescued exotic animals in California. They've managed to give Frank everything an armadillo could ever want, from dirt to dig in to the freedom to run around to a steady supply of balls that he can play with and burst. It's his hobby. He's also a bit set in his ways, and keeps to his personal schedule of recreation. While watching Frank check off his to-do list (basketball, digging, running, naps), we learn quite a bit about armadillos. They aren't cute and cuddly, and they don't make good pets. But when you get the know one like Frank, you start to appreciate his unique approach to life. Once you understand his ways, he starts to look cute, too. You can see more of Frank and the other animals at Animal Tracks at Instagram. 

When you marry the love of your life, you are also taking on that person's entire family, and that might be surprisingly unpleasant. Franklin Roosevelt's mother Sara never liked his wife Eleanor, which made life hard for Eleanor while Franklin appeared oblivious to the tensions. Harry Truman suffered the continuing scorn of Bess's mother, who even moved into the White House with the couple. To his credit, Truman graciously memorialized his mother-in-law as a "grand woman." 

In royal families, marital relations can lead to power grabs, paranoia, and death. Herod the Great of Judea felt threatened by his second wife's family, and had his brother-in-law, wife, mother-in-law, and two sons killed, although not all at the same time. It was business as usual for the ruler who decreed the death of all boys under two just to get the one who had already fled the country. Read these stories and others of families you really didn't want to marry into at Mental Floss. You can also listen to the list in a video at the same link.    

(Image credit: Alexander Master) 

Jonas Salk developed the first successful polio vaccine and gets most of the credit for defeating the disease. But he was one of dozens of teams around the US working on the problem in the 1950s. Salk's vaccine contained polio virus that had been inactivated (killed) and was introduced by injection. Not long afterward, Albert Sabin came up with an oral vaccine that used live but weakened polio virus that worked through the intestines, where wild polio would strike first. So how do you get the vaccine to millions of Americans in a hurry? In the 1950s, we had disposable syringes, but they weren't common and we certainly didn't have millions of them. Regular syringes were painful and had to be sterilized after each use. Putting the oral vaccine in a sugar cube and giving them to everyone was a huge undertaking, but it did the job. 

My school lined up all the students and took us to the auditorium two or three times a year to be vaccinated for something or other. We always hoped it would be the sugar cube, of course. Three sugar cubes laced with polio vaccine over time would give you lifetime immunity, and that meant something when we all knew older students who limped or had one shorter leg from polio. We didn't know the ones who didn't make it. 

Phil Edwards takes us through the process of developing the vaccine, and the massive logistical problems of getting it distributed to enough people to defeat the disease. There is a 110-second skippable ad at 3:55. -via Laughing Squid 

In the movie Wedding Crashers, two guys go to strangers' weddings to pick up women. This is kind of like that, but not at all like that. 

When Michelle and John Wylie got their 2021 wedding pictures, they noticed a guest that neither of them recognized. None of their parents did, either. They contacted the wedding venue, but no one at the hotel knew who the man was. He remained a mystery, even when Michelle asked on Facebook. It was only when she enlisted the help of a popular British internet personality that the man in the photographs was identified. He is Andrew Hillhouse. Was he a wedding crasher hoping to meet someone? Or just there for the food? No, his story is not at all nefarious and downright hilarious. Hillhouse was actually quite embarrassed about his participation in the Wylie wedding, but he's come clean now. He and Michelle have met and are now internet friends. -via Metafilter 

PS: The Metafilter threaded pointed to a similar story that happened to one of their members. 

We think of the steam turbine as the force that powered the Industrial Revolution. We think of automatic doors and vending machines as modern conveniences. But these things existed a couple of thousand years ago during the days of imperial Rome. They had accurate clocks, grain mills, and self-healing concrete, too, not to mention the amazing aqueducts and sewer systems that aren't covered here. Many inventions are ascribed to Hero of Alexandria, who was a gifted mathematician and an engineer who experimented with mechanical developments of all kinds, often powered by the physics of water, whether gravity or steam power. 

But before the Roman Empire gets all the credit, we have to remember that Hero was Greek, and Ctesibius as well, and they worked in Egypt. Both were probably expanding on even more ancient knowledge from both cultures. The Roman Empire was big and powerful enough to allow such geniuses to not only work but document their innovations in Alexandria, established by the Greeks as a center of learning and knowledge. Nevertheless, what those engineers of the Roman era accomplished is pretty impressive. -via Damn Interesting 

At about the same time every year, when huge Halloween props greet you at every store and every drink smells like pumpkin spice, SmokyMountains.com rolls out their Fall Foliage Prediction Map. It's almost all green right now, but you can move the slider below to see where the brightest colors will be for each week through November 17th. The map shown above is for the week of October 20th. If you want to plan a trip to see the autumn colors, this map is intended to help you decide what days to reserve accommodations. It's also handy to plan a photography day trip or invite your friends from the desert or the tropics to visit.  

The map uses historical data, weather trends and forecasts, user observations, and the kind of trees in each area to predict when and how the cooling temperatures will affect leaf color each week ahead. Conditions that are cooler and drier than normal in my corner of Kentucky means that leaves will turn earlier and be brighter than average. We should have some really beautiful mountains for a month or more. And, like every year, I will see those mountains and think about making a quilt in those colors, but I never do.  -via Laughing Squid 

Automobiles came along in the late 19th century, and before the 20th century rolled in were already up to more than 65 miles per hour! Of course, these were never our everyday cars, but race cars designed and built by those with a need for speed. Therefore, they looked pretty weird. Believe it or not, race cars broke the 100 mph bar in 1904. Eventually, they put jet engines and rockets in cars and got them up to ridiculous speeds, while the rest of us were driving at 75 mph or less, and we had to build a nationwide highway system just to do that. These cars were never meant to be mass-produced, because they would never be safe for getting to a destination.

Don't let the length of this video keep you from watching. They go through all the record-breaking cars in just four minutes, then show them again from the perspective of someone standing still on the roadside. Then the last four cars are shown again from an overhead drone view, twice. Somehow, I'm still most impressed with the earliest cars. -via Born in Space    

In the 1988 Tim Burton comedy Beetlejuice, the ghost with the most always spelled his own name Betelgeuse. Betelgeuse is a star in the Orion constellation, and it has four common pronunciations; one of them is Beetlejuice, which is how it is pronounced in the film. But don't practice that pronunciation, because if you say it three times, you'll have to put up with him. In fact, the movie was almost titled Betelgeuse, but the studio figured audiences would have trouble with that. 

Beetlejuice became a staple of Halloween, because the costumes were both monstrous and funny. Spirit Halloween sold a prop that resembled the sign shown in the scene above, but the word was spelled Beetlejuice. Twice. Did they think buyers wouldn't notice, or care? Or did they think fans of the film would still be confused as to the pronunciation of Betelgeuse? Or did they assume most buyers decades later hadn't seen the movie? At any rate, true fans avoided buying the sign, even if their entire house was decorated in a Beetlejuice theme. 

They've finally corrected that. This year, Spirit Halloween is offering a movie-accurate sign that lights up. And all is right with the world.   

Minnesotastan said, "There are approximately 10,000 covers, variations, and adaptations of Bohemian Rhapsody.  Over the years, all of them have been posted at Neatorama." Well, here's another one. 

Julien Cohen assembled singers and musicians from all over for a flashmob performance of "Bohemian Rhapsody" on the streets of Paris. They are all good, but particularly notable is the guitarist, 11-year old Olly Pearson, known as Guitar Olly. Olly became widely known after appearing on Britain's Got Talent earlier this year. The other soloists are credited at the YouTube page. Pulling this off meant enlisting the cooperation of apartment dwellers all around the square, plus a team of videographers and sound people, all in stealth mode. Cohen is a pianist who has organized quite a few of these pop-up public performances before, so he had some idea of what he was getting into. Still, this is the biggest and most elaborate flashmob he's managed so far.   -Thanks, gwdMaine! 

The Astronomy Picture of the Day for September 9th was taken in July by astronaut Nichole Ayers from the International Space Station. The plume of plasma rising from the clouds over earth is a Transient Luminous Event, or TLE. There are several kinds of TLEs, including jets, sprites, elves, trolls, ghosts, gnomes, and pixies. 

This particular type of TLE was later confirmed to be a gigantic jet, which is pretty rare. It's rarer still to catch it in a photograph, since the longest of them only last a couple of seconds. According to NASA, a gigantic jet is a huge electrical discharge going from the top of a high thunderstorm (around 20 kilometers) upward toward the upper atmosphere (around 100 kilometers). In other words, atmospheric storms produce a lot more electricity than we see on earth, but not all of that power makes its way down to us. Nice to know.  -via TYWKIWDBI 

(Image credit: NASA/Nichole Ayers) 

Astronomy, mathematics, physics.

The evolution in our thoughts and models: Heliocentrism and Geocentrism.

By Malin Christersson, source: https://t.co/0T2N21Uiro (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) pic.twitter.com/nDQkEEUmq9

— Cliff Pickover (@pickover) August 31, 2025

Ancient people assumed that the sun moved as it rose in the east and set in the west. Stars and planets did the same. This is geocentrism, the theory that the earth is the static center of the universe. It made sense because nothing is as human as people thinking the world revolves around them. But as scientists and philosophers observed the orbits of planets and the relative movements of stars, the idea of heliocentrism arose. That's the theory that earth and other planets revolve around the sun. The illustration above shows how each of those theories work from a distance, and which one makes more sense.  

Malin Christersson has an enhanced interactive version of the illustration at his website, along with a timeline of scientists and philosophers who advocated one theory or the other. Notably, the war between the two theories lasted up through the 17th century, mainly because geocentrism was considered to be Biblical, but also because Tycho Brahe misinterpreted an observation. -via Memo of the Air 

Jason Kottke posed a question on his blog this morning: What is the longest monosyllabic English word you can think of? It's a curious question, since we think of words with one syllable as being all the same length. To be exact, he was thinking of monosyllabic words with a lot of letters. The first thing that popped into my head was "queue." It's only five letters long, but the four vowels are redundant. You need to think of words with many consonants. The comments he got were enlightening. The actual longest monosyllabic English words are recorded by the Guinness Book of World Records, and they feature long strings of consonants. 

One commenter suggested "squirreled," which has ten letters in American English and eleven in British English. What? That's two syllables! But he argues it rhymes with "world," which only has one vowel. Language is a funny thing. Syllables are not a function of a word's spelling, but of its pronunciation. There are plenty of English words that can have varying numbers of syllables, depending on the dialect, that we can still easily understand. -via Damn Interesting 

(Image credit: Peter Trimming) 

Warning: this video will produce involuntary butt-clenching and possible vertigo. 

The 2025 UCI Mountain Bike World Championships are being held right now in the Valais canton in Switzerland. Canadian cyclist Jackson Goldstone won the Downhill World Championship in the elite category, even though at age 21 he's still technically eligible to compete in the junior category. The race down the Alpine track in Champéry was incredible, and we get to watch from Goldstone's POV angle. This is a track I would be hesitant to walk down unless it was a life or death matter. Goldstone takes it flat out in three minutes of terror as he rounds tight corners and sudden turns, all while the crowd yells and blows whistles. If the above video is too much for you, we also have a non-POV video with commentary.



Goldstone made Canada proud, as you can see in coverage of the celebration. He makes the rest of us nervous. -via kottke 

We all know how Beethoven went deaf later in his life, yet kept composing. Lesser known is the story of Johann Sebastian Bach's sight, which was always weak but he eventually went blind before he died. Bach underwent cataract surgery twice. 

In the 18th century, those who suffered from cataracts, or cloudy lenses, had only one surgical treatment available. It involved "couching," or separating the lens from the front of the eye, which could restore some vision. Replacement was not possible at the time. Bach, at age 65, turned to famous eye surgeon John Taylor, who called himself an "ophthalmiater." Taylor was famous in some places for his skill at eye surgery and in others for the disastrous results of his eye surgery. A look into his techniques would make any modern patient shudder. Taylor performed cataract couching on Bach twice. We don't know if those involved a surgery on each eye, or an attempt at repair after a failure, but we know they led to Bach's blindness and death within a few months. Read about Taylor and what he did to Bach (and later composer George Frideric Handel) at Amusing Planet. 

The Breakfast Club came out in 1985, so it was not all that meaningful to me at the time, but meant a lot to Gen X. I saw it as an oversimplified cast of five student stereotypes who all needed a hug and a wakeup call. They were changed by opening up and interacting with each other on a long detention day, which they never would have done otherwise. That's the sad part. Maybe it did inspire Gen X to reach out to each other and open up about their family problems and desire to fit in somewhere. Or more likely, they just related to the one character who was like them and carried on as usual. 

Does The Breakfast Club hold up forty years later? It seems pretty simplistic when you consider the struggles of today's students, who have always existed in a much greater variety. A remake might involve students glued to their phones and avoiding eye contact with each other until they suddenly go viral while still in detention. Screen Junkies takes us back to that one day that school detention was both funny and poignant.