One of the more bizarre ways to die is spontaneous human combustion. This is when a person's body is found to be burned while the surroundings, and often the person's extremities, are not burned at all. Dozens, and maybe hundreds, of cases were recorded during the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, so much that Charles Dickens included the phenomenon in his book Bleak House (shown above). Those cases were sensationally covered in press reports, and were often exaggerated for effect. But spontaneous human combustion is a real thing, although rare. 

It's not something that the rest of us should be afraid of. It never happens in public, and never in the animal kingdom. There are certain similarities in the documented cases that give scientists a clue. Forensic pathologist Roger Byard said that spontaneous combustion doesn't happen in animals because animals don't “wrap themselves up in blankets and drink whiskey and smoke.” Read about the particular sequence of events that lead to spontaneous human combustion at Popular Science. -via Strange Company 

In the Star Trek universe, everyone has a universal translator, which enables aliens from various planets to communicate with each other. That is necessary to tell the stories on television, but it makes the whole idea seem impossibly simple. The fact that beings from different planets would use language to communicate is about as likely as meeting extraterrestrials that had arms, legs, and faces. The 2016 movie Arrival addressed the difficulty of cross-species communication, but Star Trek went there back in 1991 with the Star Trek: TNG episode "Darmok." This is one that stayed with a lot of fans. 

Even with the universal translator, Starfleet cannot understand what Tamarians are saying, because their language is not as simple as words and ideas. Captain Picard is challenged to find what their language is really about. Andrew Muir of The Art of Storytelling explains how profound the difference is, and how Captain Picard learned the way to decipher what a Tamarian is really saying.  -via Laughing Squid 

This pink refrigerator would be right at home in a Barbie Dreamhouse, but it's out in the Namib Desert, about a 20-minute drive from the main highway in Namibia. What's even more surprising is that it's working, powered by solar panels. And it is stocked with cold drinks! 

Desert travelers might think it's a mirage, the kind you see in old cartoons when a character is stranded in the desert. No, this is an installation from the Namibia Tourism Board, as a quirky rest stop for those willing to seek it. It was puzzling when it was first installed a few years ago, but now tourists take a detour off the main road just to check it out -and get their picture taken with it. Not only is it a delight for sightseers, it makes you wonder why solar refrigerators aren't in every home in that country. A little digging tells me that such fridges are quite expensive because they are taxed extra as a luxury item in Namibia. Incidentally, those who have been to this refrigerator warn others not to sit on the metal chairs.  -via Nag on the Lake 

One generation was traumatized by Alfred Hitchcock's 1963 movie The Birds. Another generation, perhaps their children, learned to get along with their friends and neighbors thanks to an eight-foot feathered friend named Big Bird. The Bell Brothers have brought those things together as Big Bird steps into the horror flick as if he belongs. Chaos ensues. Meanwhile, Big Bird is frantically performing the rap from Outkast's 2000 song "B.O.B (Bombs Over Baghdad)." Every time a number comes up on the lyrics, the Count from Sesame Street is there for it. As well he should be. The resulting avian remix is titled B.O.B. (Birds Over Big Bird). It's projects like this that make me feel a little less apprehensive about the future of the internet. -via Geeks Are Sexy

When someone references "the world's smallest violin," they mean that their sympathy for you is minuscule and they really don't care. The earliest pop culture reference was in a 1978 episode of M*A*S*H, when Margaret Houlihan rubs her thumb and finger together and says, “It’s the world’s smallest violin, and it’s playing just for you.” However, the joke could be much older.

But now scientists at Loughborough University in Leicestershire, England, have broken the record for making a violin very small. They covered a chip in two layers of a gel substance, then used thermal scanning probe lithography to etch a violin on it. A layer of platinum was applied, then the underlying material was removed. The result is a platinum violin that is 13 microns wide and 35 microns long, smaller than the finest human hair.

The violin is just an image, and is not playable. If it were, you wouldn't be able to hear it. But it's terribly tiny.  -via Slashdot

(Image credit: Loughborough University)

We have a hard time visualizing how big the earth really is. We know intellectually that it's more or less a sphere that's about 24,000 miles around at the middle. From the surface to the sphere's center is 6731 kilometers (3958 miles). We've barely scratched the surface, literally, when we try to dig deep into it. How can we visualize that distance in a different way?   

Here's another mind blowing comparison from MetaBallStudios (previously at Neatorama). They take a core sample out of the earth the size of New York City and raise it up above the surface! The city itself is included for scale. This core blows past the altitude of the ISS in no time. You might want to keep your cursor over the pause button, because there are captions that describe what we are seeing, including terms you'll want to look up. Stay to the end, because there's a surprise sequence you won't want to miss.  -via The Awesomer

The Great Depression changed the US in more ways than people realize today. Franklin Delano Roosevelt became president as the economy sank further and further. His New Deal programs were designed for the three "R"s: relief, recovery, and reform. There were many programs the government rolled out between 1933 and 1938, and those that didn't yield results were dropped, while the most effective survive today. The programs that worked gave us affordable mortgages, electricity in rural areas, the minimum wage and the 44-hour work week (since changed to 40), protections for bank accounts, national park amenities, old age pensions, protection for our natural resources, rules for Wall Street trading, and a lot more. All this required massive government spending, but it got us through the decade. After World War II boosted the American economy into the black, some Depression era programs were considered so important that they were made permanent. Read about those New Deal programs and how they changed America at Mental Floss.

(Image source: Library of Congress)

You know of Ed Gein, even if you were never sure how to pronounce his name. He was a serial killer who inspired numerous cinematic killers such as Buffalo Bill, Norman Bates, Leatherface, and a bunch of other movie characters, including himself. In 1957, investigators searched Gein's home and found bodies and body parts of numerous people in various stages of dismemberment. Gein was trying to make a suit out of human skin that he could wear and become his mother. He had exhumed most of them from graveyards, but confessed to two murders. Gein was convicted of one murder and is suspected to be behind many other cases of missing persons around Plainfield, Wisconsin. He spent the rest of his life in a mental institution.

You can read about Gein's crimes in many places, but you also have to wonder, what could have led to Gein's twisted view of the world and of the people he treated so carelessly? Weird History focuses on his early life with his parents, and uncovers a story that can best be described as "how not to raise children." It's no excuse for his actions, but it is another horror story connected with Gein. 

When Europeans colonized the Americas, they found corn, an easily-grown and inexpensive grain. Eventually, many of the poorest people in Europe were eating little besides corn, made into polenta in Italy, and began to suffer from a disease called pellagra. For hundreds of years, no one knew what caused pellagra, but some suspected it was caused by a fungus or insects associated with corn. Only in the 1920s did they realize it was a nutritional deficiency, and in the '30s it was found to be a lack of niacin (vitamin B3). The poor folks who consumed mostly polenta suffered from skin rashes and diarrhea, and if it went untreated, they developed dementia, called pellagrous insanity.

During those hundreds of years, Italian sufferers could end up at San Servolo or San Clemente, two islands off of Venice with hospitals for the mentally ill. Treatment of these inmates varied according to their social status and the medical philosophy of those in charge of the hospitals. It took way too long for authorities to figure out why an improved diet would "cure" individuals, only for them to return later after eating little besides polenta in their home towns. Read about the mental hospitals of San Servolo and San Clemente at Smithsonian.

(Image credit: Kasa Fue)

The mythical dragon as a reptile that can fly and breathe fire is astonishingly universal. Ancient stories of dragons are found in all corners of the earth. How did such an iconic yet mythical creature find its way into such diverse cultures?

According to history as it is written, the first dinosaur fossil was discovered in 1677. Actually, it was the first such find that was studied and illustrated, and naturalist Robert Plot didn't know what it was. The idea of dinosaurs didn't take root until the early 19th century. But we can be sure that dinosaur fossils were discovered by plenty of people long before any of that, even before written language. People just called them dragons.

Still, that doesn't explain all the features of a dragon, like the fire-breathing part. For that, we may have to consider what the earth was like when people looked to stories to explain the more mysterious and frightening parts of their lives. This TED-Ed lesson looks at some of those stories and how they may have contributed to our idea of dragons.  

Human beings are sometimes described as the apex species of earth, which you would assume from the way we've taken over. But it wasn't easy getting here, and the way we make more humans is real crapshoot, evolutionarily speaking. This is true of all mammals, in comparison to insects or birds, but humans have a harder time and a much higher failure rate than other mammals. For every fertilized egg that makes it to actual birth, two are failures and are discarded along the way, most even before a woman knows she is pregnant. About half of these miscarriages are because the fertilized egg has the wrong number of chromosomes. Another way that human reproduction is so fraught is because of the huge demands a human fetus put on the mother, leading to conditions like gestational diabetes and pre-eclampsia, which can be fatal.

What makes humans so uniquely bad at reproduction among mammals? There are plenty of theories, but the evidence points to the fact that we developed large brains that demand more resources, and to the fact that such a brain, and other features that define us as human, developed when the world's population was so low that mutations weren't selected out early. Read how the human gene system went strangely wonky at the Conversation.

When Sigourney Weaver kicked ass in the movie Alien in 1979, it set off a tsunami of sequels and loosely related films. That was because the alien xenomorph scared the daylights out of us. It was only a matter of time before this universe was brought to television. The series Alien: Earth debuts on FX on August 12th.

This series takes place before the events of the original 1979 movie (but after Prometheus and Alien: Covenant), so you know that what happens will be held tightly wrapped from the public on earth. The premise is that a spaceship from the Weyland-Yutani Corporation crash-lands on earth. As you might guess, there is facehugger on board. But there are also four other alien species brought back from who-knows-where! We may never find out, but we know that these aliens are not benign, and present a lethal threat to earth. -via Geeks Are Sexy

Legends have come down to us from ancient times about dead bodies that rise from the grave to terrorize the living. That's where we get the concept of vampires, zombies, and revenants. But fear of the dead goes back much further, to the Neolithic era, as we find more burials that have been engineered to keep a body from rising again. As these finds get older and older, we have to think about why we bury the dead in the first place. Deliberate burials go back at least 100,000 years, although archaeologists still argue about how deliberate some of these graveyards really were. And burial practices of ancient humans are hard to discern. Were stones placed on top of graves to keep animals from digging them up, or to keep the dead from coming back to haunt us?

Different burial sites have vastly different customs, which come from the dominant culture, but some graves even in the same graveyard appear to have extra steps that make this one burial different from those around it. What do these burial customs say about the way that person was regarded? Or were they "pinned down" so that they couldn't rise up and spread the disease that killed them? Read about the research into the long history of our fear of the dead returning at Aeon.  -via Real Clear Science   

(Image credit: Alissa Mittnik, Chuan-Chao Wang, Jiří Svoboda, Johannes Krause)

The sixth film in The Karate Kid franchise is in theaters now. Karate Kid: Legends brings Ralph Macchio and Jackie Chan together. Chan's character was also in the 2010 movie The Karate Kid, starring Jaden Smith, which was a remake with the same plot as the 1984 original, except it took place in China. The movie did well, but you might be surprised to learn that it was the highest grossing of all the Karate Kid films. That's because it was not only set in China, it was a hit in China.

But what was shown in China was not quite the same movie. Knowing how lucrative the Chinese market could be, the producers of The Karate Kid bent over backwards to get the film in Chinese theaters. For one thing, there is no karate in China, it is kung fu, so the movie was titled Gong Fu Meng (Kung Fu Dream). It was edited differently from the American version, with the spotlight on Chinese movie stars who got little screen time in the American version. Some plot points were changed, too, to please Chinese censors. Read up on how The Karate Kid was changed for the Chinese audience at Den of Geek.

I never thought about the fact that Lynyrd Skynyrd's "Free Bird" didn't have a music video. See, in 1973 when the song was new, music videos weren't a thing. It was another ten years before MTV came along, and by then we had concert footage and memories to go with the song. Well now, the band has an official music video for "Free Bird." It's nothing like what you thought of the song at the time, but it's perfect for 2025.

If there were a music video produced for the song back in the 1970s, it would probably have had a visual representation of the lyrics, about a guy who couldn't stay in a relationship because he was had to fly away and enjoy his freedom. Instead, this video evokes the emotions and memories that people of a certain age (like the members of Lynyrd Skynyrd) have when they hear the song. "Free Bird" was a part of the soundtrack of your life 50 years ago, a rather magical time for those who were there. -via Laughing Squid