There are some legal cases that should make Americans grateful for the separation of church and state. This one wasn't all that long ago. In the 1980s, the Sisters of the Order of Poor Clare lived in a convent in Bruges, Belgium. Most were elderly, and were counting on the Catholic church to care for them in their old age after a lifetime of devotion, isolation, and poverty. But they heard that their bishop was planning to liquidate the convent and separate the nuns. So they took matters into their own hands.

The nuns legally owned the convent, and they wanted any property and profits from it to go to their families when they died. However, the church takes a vow of poverty seriously, and considered any property of the nuns to be the church's property. In the wake of the dissolution rumors, the nuns skipped ahead of the bishop and sold the convent themselves, along with the priceless artworks it contained. With the proceeds, they bought a crumbling castle in the south of France, with a swimming pool and tennis courts, but no running water. They also bought cars and racehorses. By the time the bishop heard about the sale, it was a done deal. The eight nuns were very happy in their new retirement home, but that was far from the end of the story. The bishop wanted the convent, its artworks, and the nuns, back under his control. Read about the runaway nuns of Poor Clare at Mel magazine.

One of the reasons white sliced bread became so ubiquitous was because of the expense of meeting rising food quality and safety standards- only large corporations could afford to scale up the process at the time, and white bread just seemed so clean and modern compared to the darker breads from one's own kitchen or a local bakery. The upshot was that all the nutrition was taken out of flour to make the bread white, and eventually those nutrients had to be re-added in processed form.

In the generation before mine, white sliced bread was a luxury. One family I knew only let the father eat store-bought bread (which they called "light bread"), while the rest of the family had fresh baked biscuits or cornbread, which now seems totally backwards for a patriarchy. When I was a kid, white bread was an everyday thing, although not Wonder bread because it was relatively expensive. Now even the thought of eating tasteless, gummy, white sliced bread makes me queasy.   

If you want to shorten this video's viewing time, the first two minutes are the history of bread itself, then we get into white bread. -via Boing Boing

Weird Al Yankovic has been making funny parody versions of pop songs for about 40 years now. He famously always seeks permission from the original artists, even though he's not required to under fair use regulations. Some say no, but most are thrilled to have the honor of a Weird Al parody. Or at least they do before they hear the song. Some will work closely with Yankovic to produce something they would be proud of, and a few were publicly upset when they heard the final result. Prince never gave permission. Paul McCartney's vegetarianism is the reason we never heard the parody of "Live and Let Die," which was going to be named "Chicken Pot Pie." A few artists liked the parodies so much that they use Weird Al's lyrics instead of their own on occasion! Read the stories of how 15 artist reacted to Weird Al parodies of their songs at Cracked.

Butterflies are beautiful and are the favorite insect for most folks (I like honeybees best myself). But they aren't here to please us, as Hank Green makes clear. He also mentions at the beginning that butterflies don't have weird, creepy tentacles, which turns out to be untrue. Have you ever heard of a "wafting organ"? That's the thoroughly unscientific name for coremata, which are stinky butt tentacles you never expect to see on a butterfly. Female butterflies like them, and that's what matters to a male butterfly. Or moth, which is the go-to example here for some reason. I'm sure Minnesotastan knows more about this; he's the only butterfly expert I know.

You'd think the world's largest plant would have already been "discovered," but this one is in the ocean. Also, it's been seen quite a lot, but scientists have recently discovered that a field of seagrass is all one connected plant. The species of seagrass is Posidonia australis, also called fibre-ball weed or ribbon weed. The single plant with its millions of blades covers 200 square kilometers, or 77 square miles! That dwarfs the previous record holder, a quaking aspen called Pando that has 47,000 stems covering less than a square mile.

The seagrass is in Shark Bay off the coast of Western Australia. The enormous plant is believed to have started with a single seedling some 4500 years ago, and has spread by sending out shoots of rhizomes. Genetic studies show that its DNA is identical from one end to the other. The plant has yet to earn a nickname, and I think we can do better than Pando this time. Read more about the largest plant in the world at the Guardian. -via reddit

(Image credit: Rachel Austin/University of Western Australia)

Imogene Rechtin was horrified by the idea of germs. Germ theory was still relatively new when Rechtin decided people were just plain kissing each other too much, and spreading germs to everyone they met. Women often greeted each other with a short kiss on the lips, and some people even kissed both cheeks when they met! At a party in 1910, Rechtin's revulsion at a reception line in which the hostess kissed all attendees inspired her mission to stop such promiscuous germ sharing. She began a movement, and an organization called the World Health Organization (really) to push for less kissing, even in the privacy of one's home.

Rechtin's campaign was ridiculed in the press. It was seen as just another of many public reform campaigns of the time, like women's suffrage, temperance, or the strange ideas of health gurus like John Harvey Kellogg. The campaign to end kissing only lasted a year and a half. But Rechtin's story is worth remembering, because she was right. Promiscuous kissing is a surefire way to transfer germs. Beyond that, her efforts highlighted the lack of body autonomy for women. Read about Imogene Rechtin and her campaign against kissing at Smithsonian.

Borzah Yankey has a TikTok channel dedicated to making people smile. Yankey has been told he has an infectious smile ever since he was a kid. The Winnipeg, Manitoba, resident started posting smile videos on TikTok to give people something to smile about during the pandemic. He's been quite successful at that. Not only does he have a nice smile, he's got a mouth full of bright white teeth that you can't miss. The effect of his videos, particularly on babies, has sparked a TikTok challenge called “try not to smile.” It's pretty near impossible. But it's spawned a huge number of reaction videos, particularly from parents of babies, who use Yankey's face to brighten their children's moods.

Watching these kids catch a smile will make you smile, too. Someone mentioned that the five seconds of black screen at the end was so that people can see their own faces reflected in their phone screen... smiling. -via reddit

Oh my. This newspaper announcement might bring up a vision of the bedroom sign we featured a couple of months ago. And this is for a couple who isn't married yet! But there's more here than meets the eye. When I saw this clipping from Bad Newspaper, I tried hard to figure out where the typo was, and what it's supposed to say. There is no typo.

An Old Fashioned Pounding is a real thing. Today we would call it a food shower, when friends and community come together to stock a pantry with staples like flour, sugar, cornmeal, beans, and spices. The name comes from the fact that a lot of these goods were sold by the pound. It's a great idea for a newly married couple, or for someone who is establishing a new home. Traditionally, churches did it when a new pastor took up residence in a parsonage.  

Considering the way the term "pounding" is used in the 21st century though, you might want to call your party a food shower, just to keep the prurient puns to a minimum.

(Image credit: Togekriss)

You know how you see something on the internet and you think "I could do that!" Maybe you can, or maybe your first attempt is nothing at all like the posted artist's 100th time doing that thing professionally. The cakes above were all supposed to recreate the cake in the middle, with some attempts coming close, and some failing spectacularly. I bet they all tasted good, though. Sometimes a recreation is nothing like the original, but it turns out to be wonderful in its own way.

(Image credit: lolosun)

No one would recognize these as llamas, but they are adorable in their googly-eyed glory. See a roundup of 50 projects that didn't come out quite as planned at Bored Panda.

When archaeologists dug out the ancient city of Pompeii, they found the remains of hundreds of people trying to flee the destruction wrought by Mt. Vesuvius. But they also found two skeletons crouching in a corner of their dining room. Why weren't they trying to run away? They weren't elderly. New research gives us a clue.    

An international team of scientists took a piece of bone from the male skeleton and sequenced his DNA. They found that he suffered from spinal tuberculosis, which probably meant that he was unable to run, or possibly even walk. The man, who was about 35, was doomed from the beginning of the eruption. Was his companion also afflicted with some disability, or was she just unwilling to leave without him? The study also gives us clues as to the man's origins, as he wasn't a native of Pompeii. Read about this discovery at Engadget. -via Boing Boing

(Image credit: Notizie degli Scavi di Antichità)

We've featured the giant mechanical figures of Les machines de l'île, in Nantes, France, a few times before at Neatorama. These impressive behemoths are like something out of a science fiction film -by Jules Verne, of course. The animals are both technological wonders and works of art. Now we can take a look inside the place where they are built, stored, and used. And if you're ever in the neighborhood, you can ride one yourself for less than ten euros! If not, take a ride with Tom Scott on a 40-foot-tall steampunk mechanical elephant in this video. It might be a little loud, and maybe a little wet, but you'll never forget it.

Remember when we discovered that cats are frightened by cucumbers? We still don't know why, but it's probably just the appearance of a novel item they aren't familiar with. That meme went viral, so everyone had to try it. But this one is real- male mice go into high stress in the presence of bananas. I guess that's good for banana trees, but this particular fear developed for a different reason.

Mice from different experiments happened to be in the same lab at McGill University, and researchers noticed a stress response in male mice when they were in the presence of pregnant or lactating females. Wanting to find out why, they designed other experiments to see what chemical may have caused it. They narrowed it down to a compound called n-pentyl acetate in the pregnant/lactating mice's urine, which induces a stress response in male mice, particularly virgin male mice. That's an adaptive strategy, as male mice tend to kill baby mice.

But wait a minute. It turns out that n-pentyl acetate is the chemical that makes a banana smell the way it does! So of course the researchers went to a supermarket and bought some banana oil to check their work. Sure enough, the male mice were terrified when they were exposed to banana oil in the room. It you don't have a cat, you might be able to deter at least some mice by sticking cotton balls soaked in banana oil around the house. Maybe. The chemical also induced an analgesic effect in the mice. You can read more about these experiments at LiveScience. -via Damn Interesting 

An old saying says that behind every great man, there's a hard-working woman. The adage was always meant to point out that women rarely get the respect they deserve for what they do behind the scenes, but in the Mongol Empire, some of them got plenty of respect. While the warriors were out conquering the world, the women who were kept in place by childrearing responsibilities were also tasked with holding territory and making society work. They supervised not only the home, but activities for the entire camp, like resolving disputes, meeting with traders, overseeing livestock workers, and planning migration. Women who weren't restricted to home by children were likely to become warriors themselves. Some estimates say that up to 20% of Chinggis Khan’s forces were women!

Chinggis Khan’s daughter-in-law Töregene became so powerful that she engineered the succession of the new Khan after her husband died, even though she wasn't even his head wife. She reigned as regent for her oldest son with the support of the warlords and advisors. Read about the roles of women in the Mongol Empire at Atlas Obscura.

Just a few decades ago, heart transplants were scary, futuristic procedures that produced miracles. They still are. It's just that now we have more of them and know more about them. Well, at least doctors know more about them nowadays. To the rest of us, a heart transplant is still in the realm of magic. This TED-Ed lesson takes us through the procedures involved in a heart transplant to make it more understandable. But even when you know how it's done, it still seems like a scary futuristic miracle.

Jules Verne wrote the novel Around the World in Eighty Days in 1872, in which Phileas Fogg makes a wager that he can travel around the world in just eighty days. Fogg did precise calculations to gauge his travel, and although he ran into complications, completed the trip in time. Can someone do that today? There have been a few people, mainly celebrities, who recreated Fogg's feat, one even on a bicycle. But can an ordinary person using ordinary travel methods do it? Yes they can! You don't even need a private plane.

There are a few trick involved, though. Rail travel is still feasible in many parts of the world, and your route should take you through nations that aren't at war or hard to enter. The real trick is to book passage on cargo ships. Read how, with a bit of planning, you can circumnavigate the earth in eighty days at The Travel.