The horror film The Exorcist was a hit in 1973, but it wasn't the first time the idea of demon possession was staged for an audience. In the 1590s, a young woman from the village of Romorantin, France, exhibited the signs of possession. Her body would contort in spasms, her eyes would roll back in her head, and she would speak without opening her mouth, emitting guttural sounds seemingly from her stomach. Martha Brossier's family blamed it on a neighbor who was a witch. What would you do in this situation? Would you call a doctor or a priest? Or both?

Martha's father had a better idea. He put her on stage in a traveling show. People would pay money to see a woman under the influence of a demon! Martha and her father traveled throughout France, demonstrating her unnatural symptoms to astonished audiences, and she was often exorcized by local priests. That provided a happy ending for the audience, yet she would be possessed again in the next village. But when the two went to Paris, they found themselves under the scrutiny of Michel Marescot, the personal physician of King Henry IV. Learn how Marescot unmasked the fake victim of possession at Mental Floss. -via Strange Company 

Infinite dream (part 1) pic.twitter.com/9KgUZMlKgk

— Vaskange (@Vaskange) August 15, 2022

French artist Vaskange has been experimenting with the iPad app called Endless Paper to make zoom illustrations that tell a story. I was completely hooked into the dream above when the sheep showed up, and I can't wait to see part two. Meanwhile, here's one about a robot and his pet bird in a dystopian city of the future.

Endless robot story (part 1)
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With a music especially composed by @adrienmelano for the video!
I am curious to know your interpretation of the story so far?
App: @endlesspaper pic.twitter.com/6ltrp3Y3Gd

— Vaskange (@Vaskange) August 26, 2022

While that one's bittersweet, or maybe creepy depending on how you see it, it's still beautiful. Want to see more? Here's one about the artist's vacation, and you'll no doubt want to bookmark Vaskange's Instagram gallery to catch further episodes.

-via Metafilter

It appeared to be an open-and-shut case. A respected Catholic priest, Father Hubert Dahme, was shot in the head on the streets of Bridgeport, Connecticut, in 1924. A week later, 20-year-old vagrant Harold Israel was accused of the murder. Seven eyewitnesses identified him. The gun in his possession was the one police believed to have been used to assassinate the priest. And Israel confessed to the crime. However, when it came time for his arraignment, prosecutor Homer Cummings went through the evidence against Israel and tore it down piece by piece in a 90-minute court presentation. Cummings had studied the case and determined that Israel had been railroaded.

Normally, when the prosecution finds the evidence lacking, they will quietly drop the case. That would leave Israel a free man, but the headlines about the prominent case would follow him the rest of his life. Meanwhile, there were no other suspects in the murder. Cummings said, "It is just as important for a state's attorney to use the great powers of his office to protect the innocent as it is to convict the guilty." The case was later made into a 1947 movie called Boomerang! You can read what Cummings unearthed in his own investigation, along with four other wild historical stories, in an article at Cracked.   

Paul Klusman and TJ Wingard are the cat engineers (previously at Neatorama and at Supa Fluffy). Their cats are Oscar, Ginger, and Zoey. They love the cats, but for years they've been trying to figure out if these cats can be useful at all. This video is a review of the latest in cat laser technology. Equipping cats with laser eye technology can be fun, but it can also be put to good use in welding, cutting, pest control, and communications. Also to fight aliens. And to have fun, too. The second half of this video is a throwback to what we non-engineers first used lasers for: to accompany disco music.

This video is the second of the day to feature monotone engineers with a fascinating subject. But while arches and chains left us with a cool new understanding of physics in architecture, this one just leaves us glad to have watched it. -via Laughing Squid

The American Alliance of Museums posted a list of the best museum bathrooms. Sure, they are all pretty and clean and have the conveniences one would need, but the loos listed are so much more than that. To be a best museum bathroom, you have to consider what makes this bathroom in this museum not only nice, but also clever, interesting, and appropriate. Some are downright fascinating!

History museums tend to continue their lessons right into the more private facilities. The head in the Mariner's Museum and Park has its own exhibition about, well, you can probably guess. The Charleston Museum has a fancy display of fancy chamber pots in its ladies room. Art museums are more likely to commission well-known artists to design their restrooms as functioning works of art. Then there are illusion restrooms, experimental restrooms, and unexpected experience restrooms, which you can see at The American Alliance of Museums.  -via Boing Boing

I knew a little bit about how arches work, but I didn't know how they related to hanging chains. If you've never taken an engineering course, this lesson might blow your mind. The concept is described in a clear and concise way at the beginning, but the further you go into how arches and chains actually work, the more interesting it gets. We may laugh at the lack of medical knowledge up through the medieval era, but at the same time engineers and architects were transforming their physics observations and experiments into amazing bridges and cathedrals that are still in use hundreds of years later. After watching this video from Engineering Models, I feel like I have learned an awful lot in just a few minutes.

If you enjoyed that and want more, the same channel explains the physics that govern the designs of suspension bridges, Gothic cathedrals, dams, retaining walls, silos and tanks, and tunnels and culverts. -via Nag on the Lake

A new project at Cambridge University, funded by Wellcome, seeks to digitize more than 180 medieval manuscripts containing the state of medicine of the time. These manuscripts go back a thousand years, but most are from the 14th and 15th centuries. The difficulty of this project lies in the fact that the original volumes are crumbling, and those that are in English are in Middle English, which is not all that easy to translate. Others are in Latin or French, but still need to be translated through a lens of time. But these manuscript contain around 8,000 medical recipes of the time when medical cures were often just wishful thinking. Some of them seem to fall into the category of "giving the sufferer or his family something to do."

One treatment for gout involves stuffing a puppy with snails and sage and roasting him over a fire: the rendered fat was then used to make a salve. Another proposes salting an owl and baking it until it can be ground into a powder, mixing it with boar’s grease to make a salve, and likewise rubbing it onto the sufferer’s body.

To treat cataracts – described as a ‘web in the eye’ – one recipe recommends taking the gall bladder of a hare and some honey, mixing them together and then applying it to the eye with a feather over the course of three nights.

The project, expected to take two years, will result in an online database that anyone can access. Read about this project at the University of Cambridge. -via Damn Interesting

We all know the story of King Arthur. He was born of a king, but not acknowledged until he magically pulled a sword out of a stone. He united Britain and established the rule of law. He brought knights to his round table and set them off in search of the Holy Grail. He conquered his enemies in battle and endured an affair between his queen and his best knight. His was finally beaten in battle by his own kinsman and was taken off to Avalon, where he awaits the call to return to power.

However, almost all of that story was added and embellished over the past 1600 years. If you go back to the oldest documentation on Arthur, he was not a king but a local hero who defended his homeland against all enemies. This hero was apparently famous enough that even in the Dark Ages others were compared to him. He might not have even been named Arthur, but there is the possibility that the stories are told about a real person in 6th century Britain.

After the Romans left Britain in 410 AD, the land was plunged into the Dark Ages. The islands fell into economic collapse, illiteracy, and famine. Community alliances splintered as Saxons invaded. But archeological evidence at the ruins of Tintagel, the stronghold in Cornwall where Arthur was supposedly born, hint that it had a flourishing community in the 6th century, faring far better than other areas of Britain. Could that be because a mighty warrior led their defenses? Read what we've learned about the legend of Arthur, and how difficult it is to sort fact from fiction at Smithsonian.

(Image credit: Astrobiologic)

Lowbrow Studios makes Pac-Man a lot more dramatic and a lot more bloody with the addition of an evil mad scientist. Dr. Albert Gerhardt Bergstrom is more than the ghosts can handle! He's made what was supposed to be a fun little game into a disgusting series of tortures. After all, the ghosts normally just kill Pac-Man, which they know isn't so bad because the ghosts are already dead yet still chasing around, and Pac-Man will come back for more. But will he come back for more of this?

But there's a twist. Once Dr. Albert Gerhardt Bergstrom is gone, someone even worse takes his place! -via Geeks Are Sexy

A funeral often has a large meal afterward, because it can mean hours of ceremonies for family and friends who may have traveled a long way to be there. The meal is often provided by a church or community group. In the past, these meals were as traditional as the funeral rites themselves, and everyone knew what their role would be if someone died. Among the Pennsylvania Dutch, the Amish, and the Mennonites in the 19th century, these meals were not only traditional, they were quite lavish and well-attended. And there was always raisin pie.

Why raisin pie? For one thing, it was a pie you could make any time of year since it used preserved fruit. It was also quite extravagant and not likely to be made outside of a special occasion. Raisins were labor-intensive before seedless varieties of grapes were developed. Another reason was because it could stay on a table without refrigeration. Over time, raisin pie came to be used only for funerals in Pennsylvania, and serving it at any other time could be taken as an insult. Read about the tradition of raisin pie for funerals, and find a recipe too, at Atlas Obscura.

In 1935, William C. Adams was chief of the Division of Fish and Game in New York State. He had previously held that same post in Massachusetts, and was by all accounts an expert in the field. But at the annual meeting of the Angler's Club, he excitedly told the audience about a new species of fish that had been discovered in Yellowstone- the fur-bearing trout. He explained that the trout had evolved to grow fur because the water was so cold, and that Native Americans harvested the fur because it prevented goiter.

We don't know whether Adams ever recovered from the incident, which made the newspapers. The fur-bearing trout is as real as a jackalope or a drop bear, and whoever told that fish story to the fishing expert apparently made it quite convincing. However, he may have read it in a 1929 issue of Montana Wildlife magazine, which was published by the Montana State Fish and Game Department.

I wasn't familiar with fur-bearing trout, but I'm no fisherman. It is a legend that goes back to Iceland in the 17th century. It is told wherever bodies of water may be cold enough to convince visitors, and especially in places where taxidermists know how to wrap a fish in rabbit fur. In places where the water is warmer, the story often includes the detail of its origin, when someone spilled hair tonic in the local waterway.

(Image credit: Samantha Marx)

The misconception that there is no sound in space originates because most space is a ~vacuum, providing no way for sound waves to travel. A galaxy cluster has so much gas that we've picked up actual sound. Here it's amplified, and mixed with other data, to hear a black hole! pic.twitter.com/RobcZs7F9e

— NASA Exoplanets (@NASAExoplanets) August 21, 2022

"In space, no one can hear you scream." That may be true, depending on who is listening. Humans can only hear a certain range of sounds. The idea also persists because the space we've been able to travel through is a vacuum. Not all of space is a vacuum, though; a portion of it is made up of gas. The Perseus galaxy has a lot of gas in its space, and the black hole at the center of the galaxy moans. These sound waves were detected by NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, but they can't be heard in their raw form, which is 57 octaves below middle C. So NASA has "translated" the sound, much as they translate colors of far away images that are in parts of the light spectrum we cannot see with human eyes. This is what we call sonification. Read more about the project at NASA.

This sonification of a black hole was released back in May to celebrate NASA's Black Hole Week, but it appears that no one paid attention until it was posted to Twitter this past weekend. Yeah, you can guess there are already remixes. Speaking of remixes, the sonification of another black hole from the galaxy Messier87 combines data from three different sources to make the black hole sing, which you can see at the NASA link. -Thanks, WTM!

Ethel Marie Dillow married Glen Gifford Pendergraft in 1928. Glen died in 1965. Marie outlived him by quite a few years and died in... wait, when did she die? You might have to do some math to figure out that she died in 2008. This gravestone tells a story about the way we think of time. The stone was most likely erected in 1965. Back then, the 21st century seemed far away. As a kid, I thought about how very old I would be when the year 2000 rolled in. I'd be 41! At any rate, carving on a tombstone is easier and less expensive at the monument shop than in a cemetery, so Marie apparently had her death year pre-carved to begin with a 19. She didn't consider the possibility that she would live into the 21st century, but then she lived to the age of 98. Her survivors did what they could to make the gravestone accurate, even though they had to pay a premium for more characters to be carved on-site. The contrast in the black-and-white photo above may lead you to suspect Photoshop, but the images at Find-a-Grave make it clear that the gravestone is real.

(Image credit: u/kenistod)

The US has been battling invasive carp for almost 50 years, but they are thriving in the Mississippi River and other waterways. We've tried stopping them by wielding acoustic weapons, turning them into a food crop, and hunting them as a weird but challenging sport. Catching them is not hard; they just jump into the boat. But as carp multiply their way closer to the Great Lakes, where they could wreck the balance of native species, we've had to pull out the big guns.

The US Army Corps of Engineers built a series of "fences" by electrifying the water in canals leading to Chicago in order to stop the traveling carp from entering Lake Michigan. This electrified water is serious business, and canal traffic has to adhere to strict rules to keep people safe from being electrocuted. Tom Scott explains how it works.

In 1663, the partial fossilised skeleton of a woolly rhinoceros was discovered in Germany. This is the “Magdeburg Unicorn”, one of the worst fossil reconstructions in human history. pic.twitter.com/rmV1vcB3LY

— Brian Roemmele (@BrianRoemmele) August 14, 2022

This ridiculous picture can't help but make you laugh. It's as if someone played tinkertoys with a drawer of fossils. But that's exactly what happened. I had to look up the Magdeburg Unicorn, and lucky for me, Snopes has already done the research.

The fossils were unearthed at Seweckenberge, Germany, in 1663. Those who dug them up weren't particularly rigorous about documenting their depth or relative positions, or even with keeping the fossils from breaking. It was a long time ago. A few years later, Prussian scientist Otto von Geuricke constructed the beast that is now known as the Magdeburg Unicorn. The unicorn was later deconstructed, but we don't know when, and that's where things get complicated. Michael Bernhard Valentini drew a picture of the fossil construction dated 1704, but he did it from Geuricke's notes and descriptions instead of viewing the unicorn. Philosopher and scientist Gottfried Leibniz published a description of the unicorn in 1749, along with Valentini's drawing. But Leibniz's book that contained the description was published after his death, so no one could question him about it. There is speculation that Valentini's drawing, or some other drawing, may have come before Geuricke's fossil construction. In fact, some scientists question whether Geuricke was the one who put the bones together in the first place.

Today you can see the unicorn at the Museum für Naturkunde in Magdeburg, Germany. Scientists have identified three different animals that the bones once belonged to. -via Everlasting Blort