Afraid of spiders? Maybe it's because of all those stories you've heard about their creepy ways. Some of those stories hold no water, according to science writer Kim Hosey. She's got a good list of busted spider myths.
The daddy long-legs does not "have the most potent venom to humans, but its mouth is too small to bite humans." They're not venomous. Still, how would we test this, exactly? Extract the venom and kill a bunch of people on purpose?
No spider ever laid eggs in someone's skin, mouth, or beehive hairdo. Spiders are not waiting in airplane toilet seats to bite your butt.
Millipedes do not have a thousand legs. If it's roundish and has two pairs of legs per segment, it's a millipede.
For the love of god, it's venomous. Poisonous is when it's ingested or inhaled. Venom is injected into your bloodstream or deeper tissues. Most venom isn't even poisonous. And I am picturing you eating spiders when you say they're poisonous.
In 2007, science writer Carl Zimmer wondered how common science tattoos were. He said this on his blog, and the response was massive and ongoing. That grew into a completely new blog, and Zimmer became known as the guy who collected science tattoos. Now he has a book of science tattoos called Science Ink: Tattoos of the Science Obsessed. The New York Times has a slide show featuring some awesome examples from the book. The tattoo shown belongs to a Princeton graduate student in molecular biology. Link -via The Loom
(Image credit: Science Ink by Carl Zimmer/Sterling Publishing)
This little bird looks so stylish with her extra homemade tail feathers! It's cute, but she's not just being fashionable. This is a handy trick birds use to carry more nesting material than will fit in the beak. -via The Daily What
We've always heard that it is better to give than to receive. And the research is there to prove the old adage is right. A post at PsyBlog has links to several studies about this phenomenon.
But why? Why is it that spending our money on others—prosocial spending—makes us happier?
It's partly because giving to others makes us feel good about ourselves. It helps promote a view of ourselves as responsible and giving people, which in turn makes us feel happy. It's also partly because spending money on others helps cement our social relationships. And people with stronger social ties are generally happier.
The consequences of this notion can work in a circle. Not only do you want to buy gifts that bring happiness to others, it will make them even more happy to know that they gifts they give you are treasured. Link
A scientific research paper reviewed 400 YouTube videos of dogs chasing their tails. A close look showed that about a third of the dogs observed showed signs of clinical pathology ("neurological, compulsive or other pathological conditions").
Habitual tail-chasers had 6.5+/?2.3 times the odds of being described as ‘Stupid’ than other dogs, and perseverative dogs were 6.8+/?2.1 times more frequently described as ‘Funny’ than distractible ones were. Compared with breed- and age-matched control videos, tail-chasing videos were significantly more often indoors and with a computer/television screen switched on. These findings highlight that tail-chasing is sometimes pathological, but can remain untreated, or even be encouraged, because of an assumption that it is ‘normal’ dog behaviour.
Another takeaway from this study is how YouTube can provide a vast and unsifted resource of behavioral observations to researchers of all kinds. Someday a scientist may be watching your behavior, either on video, in the description, or in the comments! Link
The following is an article from the bookHistory's Lists from Uncle John's Bathroom Reader.
From the archives of the Old West, we've culled a list of the most notorious places on the frontier. Here's our countdown of the baddest of the bad, meanest of the mean, Wild West towns. Some historians say that the Wild West wasn't as dangerous as we've been led to believe by Hollywood, but there's no doubt that some frontier towns were beyond the immediate reach of the law -places where mischief, mayhem, and murder were everyday occurrences.
8. FORT GRIFFIN, TEXAS One of the wildest places in the old West, Fort Griffin sprouted at the intersection of the West Fork of the Trinity River and the Clear Fork of the Brazos River in northern Texas. Built in the 1860s on a hill overlooking the Brazos, the fort itself was designed to protect the folks -mostly farmers and ranchers- who lived below in the settlement of Fort Griffin. The town was soon invaded by outlaws and cowboys driving their cattle north to Dodge City. By the 1870s, skirmishes with the Kiowa and Comanche in the north diverted the soldiers from Fort Griffin and, as a result, law enforcement broke down, which attracted even more rough types to the town.
Visiting Celebrities. The motley collection of buffalo hunters, gamblers, gunfighters, and "painted ladies" brought with them a penchant for violence. Among them were a gambler and prostitute named Big Nose Kate and her pal, the legendary gambler Doc Holliday. Also passing through were Wyatt Earp (who met Holliday for the first time at the fort), lawman Pat Garrett, and John Wesley Hardin -by some accounts the most sadistic killer to ever come out of Texas. Dustups and gun violence became so frequent that the commander of the fort finally placed the town under martial law in 1874.
7. RUBY, ARIZONA From the days of the Spanish explorations prospectors had searched for veins of gold, silver, copper, lead, and zinc near Montana Peak in southern Arizona close to the Mexican border. In 1891, high-grade gold was discovered. A local assayer judged it to be a bonanza, and the rush was on. The town of Ruby was born practically overnight.
Here Comes Trouble. Most of the miners lived in tents or rough adobe huts, and bought their meager supplies at George Cheney's Ruby Mercantile, the one and only general store. The men provided for themselves and their families by hunting and rustling cattle. But the primary source of trouble came from Mexican bandits who frequently terrorized the settlement. By the early 1900s, Ruby was so dangerous that Philip and Gypsy Clarke, who owned a general store, kept weapons in every room of their house as well as the general store. When Philip eventually sold the store to a pair of brothers, he warned them of the danger. They didn't heed Clarke's warning and were soon found shot to death. Today, Ruby is a well-preserved ghost town.
6. DELAMAR, NEVADA Delamar got its reputation as a notorious Wild West town not from gun violence but from dangerous conditions in the mines. The 1889 discovery of gold in nearby Monkey Wrench Gulch unleashed a stampede of miners intent on digging for the peculiar form of gold, encased as it was in crystallized quartz. A former ship's captain named Joseph Raphael De Lamar bought most of the profitable mines in 1893 and built a mill to crack the quartz and refine the gold. Within a few years, the town had 1,500 citizens, a hospital, post office, opera house, school, several churches, and plenty of saloons. But then the deaths began to mount.
This week we made the announcement that Neatorama is on Google+! We launched the page by giving away t-shirts from the NeatoShop. The first ones went so fast that we started up another giveaway immediately. Congratulations to winners Derrick Rossignol and Jeff Smith! There will be more giveaways at Google+ as well as links and extra stuff beyond the blog. See you there! Plus, you'll want to catch up on the features you may not have had time to read during the week:
Eddie Deezen told us A Few Facts You May Not Know About Some Like It Hot.
Jill Harness got us in the mood for the holidays with 14 Great Examples of Thanksgiving Food Art.
Uncle John's Bathroom Reader gave us Doolittle's Raid, the story of America's first response to Pearl Harbor.
A Penny’s Not Going to Kill You. But how many pennies will? Find out in the article from the Annals of Improbable Research.
From mental_floss magazine, we learned out 10 Massive Screw-Ups in Paleontology.
NeatoBambino took a geeky turn this week, with baby and child stuff mixed with Star Wars, Dr. Who, and Batman. And you have to see the video of the new book Goodnight, iPad!
In the What Is It? game this week, the pictured object is a real stumper. Rob at the What Is It? blog admitted that he doesn't know what this tool is for. It's an enduring mystery. Since we don't know who is right (if any one is), we selected TWO winners with the funniest answers! Galen said this was a specialized whisk for making wavy gravy. That’s funny! And Augie explained:
After a horrible zipper accident Stan “Soprano Singer” Stevens spent 20 years and his family fortune designing and developing this tool to remove stray body parts from pant zippers.
Stevens patented the device, but allowed other companies to freely manufacture, distribute and sell them for the common good (i.e. pro boner).
Both will get t-shirts from the NeatoShop!
The posts that got the most comments this week (besides the contest) were about the Duggers expecting their 20th child, and the pros and cons of an "opt-out" system for organ donation. We welcome your opinions!
Want more? Be sure to check our Facebook page every day for extra content, contests, discussions, videos, and links you won't find here. Also, our Twitter feed will keep you updated on what's going around the web in real time. And now, Google+, too!
Laci Davis, an 8-year-old in Cincinnati, Ohio, accidentally ingested her necklace and heart-shaped locket, which lodged in her throat.
The third-grader was in excruciating pain.
"It felt like something was stabbing me right in the middle of my chest," she said.
Doctors at St. Elizabeth sent her to Cincinnati Children's Hospital. It was the car ride that changed everything.
"We hit a pot hole and she looked at me and said, 'oh mom, I feel better.' I said what do you mean you feel better and she said 'I don't feel it anymore,'" Amanda Cullum, Laci's mother, said.
The pothole dislodged the locket, which then dropped down into Laci's stomach. The pain was gone, and Laci could breathe normally.
"It was my hero and I when I got home I was like thank you bump," she said.
Doctors told Laci the locket will come back out "the old-fashioned way." Laci says she'll get a new locket instead retrieving this one. http://www.kptv.com/story/16018828/pot-hole-saves-girls-life -via Fark
This shopping center in Reading, Pennsylvania has a crosswalk that leads to nowhere. Codes required a certain number of pedestrian crosswalks, despite the fact that there are no sidewalks. This is the required accessible crosswalk with curb ramps. But it isn't going to get you anywhere, whether you are in a wheelchair or walking. Get an explanation of how this kind of thing happens at Greater Greater Washington. Link -via Metafilter
Scheveningen prison near the Hague in the Netherlands holds prisoners for the the UN International Criminal Court. Some of those inmates think that Dutch food served in the prison is a form of torture.
“My rights are not being violated, but the food is an abomination,” declared former Liberian president Charles Taylor when he was brought to trial at the Special Court for Sierra Leone in Scheveningen in 2006.
Taylor, who was accused of crimes against humanity and orchestrating war crimes carried out by militias, was used to his own personal cook who made spicy African meals.
Unable to adjust to Dutch culinary blandness, he set up a cookery club using the facilities at the Scheveningen remand centre.
Yes, inmates are allowed to cook for themselves, but they have to buy their own ingredients from the prison shop.
Extreme Serbian nationalist and former paramilitary leader Vojislav Seselj is another notorious prisoner who slams the Dutch diet. Seselj, who was charged by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) with crimes against humanity, arrived in Scheveningen in 2003.
During one of the hearings in his trial, he publicly castigated the remand centre’s menu. The food was “a daily torture. Even pigs wouldn’t go near it.”
Prison officials defend their menu as "healthy and balanced." Just one more reason you shouldn't commit crimes against humanity. Link-Thanks, Ed!
Mental_floss is marking 11/11/11 by posting lists of 11 things all day long! It's also Veterans Day, so what better time to learn about some heroes that you might not otherwise know, like eleven women of various nations who served in World War II. One was Nancy Wake, a New Zealand native who was living in France when Germany invaded.
Wake immediately went to work for the French resistance, hiding and smuggling men out of France and ferrying contraband supplies and falsified documents. She was once captured and interrogated for days, but gave no secrets away. With the Nazis in hot pursuit, Wake managed to escape to Britain in 1943, and joined the Special Operations Executive (SOE), a British intelligence agency. After training with weapons and parachutes, she was airdropped back into France -as an official spy and warrior. Wake had no trouble shooting Nazis or blowing up buildings with the French guerrilla fighters known as maquis in the service of the resistance. She once killed an SS sentry with her bare hands.
Read what happened to Wake and ten others in this list of eleven at mental_floss. Link
The dog Kenzie cannot reach the pot at the back of the stove, so now he's glad to have spent all that effort protecting his friend Queenie the cockatoo from the cat. Rodents aren't the only pets who like spaghetti! -via Arbroath
Have you ever taken a vacation from one job so you could catch upon your other job? I have. This is from the webcomic Mr. Lovenstein by J.L. Westover. Link -via The Daily What
