Robert and Samantha's 4-year-old daughter Aubrin Sage is an experienced snowboarder- she began when she was only 18 months old! She's also into dinosaurs. Her father rigged her up with a microphone for this video, so we get to hear her commentary as she shushes down the hill. It's adorable, and there are clues to her training, as this fearless child says "I won't fall, maybe I will, but that's okay, 'cause we all fall." And she ends the video with a great pun. Robert tells us how he taught Aubrin Sage to snowboard in this blog post. You can follow the tiniest snowboarder and her family at Instagram. -via Digg

We've posted a lot about the patent medicines of the 19th century, and now here's one that's different: not a scam, not addictive, and not poison -it's just odd. Atlas Obscura was looking for a Valentine subject, and found Valentine's Meat Juice.

In the fall of 1870, Mann S. Valentine II, who ran a dry goods store, saw his wife fall ill with digestive problems that doctors couldn't treat. So he spent weeks working on a tonic made of beef juice and egg whites. Mrs. Valentine couldn't eat solid food, so it provided her with the nutrients she needed, and she rallied. Valentine was so excited about his success that he made more, and started Valentine’s Meat Juice company. His tonic became quite popular, even without heroin or cocaine, or claims to be a cure-all. President James A. Garfield even used it after he was shot in 1881. In fact, the Valentine’s Meat Juice company stayed in business until 1986! Read the story of Valentine and his meat juice at Atlas Obscura.  

PS: Upon looking for the bottles for Sandyra, I also found this post with some interesting pictures of Valentine himself.

In 1876, James McNeill Whistler designed and painted an entire room around the image of peacocks. The homeowner hated it. Peacocks adorn the classic chenille bedspreads of the mid-20th century. Louis Comfort Tiffany designed the Peacock Doors at the Palmer House Hotel in Chicago. Peacocks had legendary powers in the tales told of them, but it was simply their appearance that inspired the imagination. The image of a male peacock with those beautiful tail feathers has been a classic motif since the birds were first exported from India, but it was suddenly everywhere with the rise of Art Nouveau.

A true obsession with the peacock began in the British Arts and Crafts movement, then landed in France which birthed the Art Nouveaumovement. While the peacock left its mark on the gorgeous architecture, fabrics, jewelry, and furniture from that era, it never truly went away. Read about the Art Nouveau peacock and see lots of pictures at Messy Nessy Chic.

If you live in Minnesota -or any northern state or Canada- the ultimate in backyard family fun is a skating rink. More and more people are dedicating an area of their yard to a winter rink. Still, that fun comes with maintenance concerns. Professional rinks use Zambonis to condition the ice, which are a bit expensive to use in a private backyard. But where there's a will, there's a way. Backyard rink owners are a creative bunch, and they've employed all sorts of methods to bring the ice on a homemade skating rink to pristine condition. These methods and gadgets are called "homebonis."

Rink-makers are famous for their homemade resurfacing contraptions, from PVC pipes and towels dragged behind buckets to tanks hauled on modified golf carts. Traff hooks three snow blowers together to clear his rink and invested in a military-grade water heater to make fresh coats of ice more robust.

But all home rinks share some universals: sun and warm temps are enemies; post-skate shoveling is a necessity, and late-night flooding is a mystical state.

"When you're out there at 10 o'clock and it's dark and the wind is still, you can hear everything from miles away," Greco said. "Then once you're done, you look at that perfect sheet for the morning and you're like, 'This is awesome.' "

Watch a homeboni in action.

Read more about backyard rinks and what folks go through to maintain them at the Star Tribune.   -via TYWKIWDBI

What you see above is a small portion of the Great Miracle Wisteria, which had been growing at Ashikaga Flower Park in Japan for 140 years. A wisteria vine can grow awfully big in that time! It's only one of many wisteria vines of all colors that grow in the park. The best time to see wisteria is mid-April to mid-May, but other flowers worth seeing bloom in other months. Yet even in winter, Ashikaga Flower Park is quite popular, as they replace the blossoms with millions of festive lights. In fact, most of the Instagram pictures tagged with Ashikaga Flower Park show the winter lights.  

Would you rather see a murmuration of starlings in Denmark? Frozen lake bubbles in Alberta? Glow worms in Alabama? A moonbow in Zimbabwe? Smithsonian has a rundown of natural phenomena worth traveling for all over the world, for a vacation that will help you commune with nature. Although I might save you some money by reminding you that you can also see a moonbow at Cumberland Falls State Park in Kentucky.

Daniel Solis created a whole new order of birds with the help of artificial intelligence. He fed images from old public domain bird illustrations from the Biodiversity Heritage Library into the program called LookingGlassAI 1.1. The results range from "you might believe this is a real bird" to "what kind of mess am I looking at?"

Only some of these images are named. Maybe Solis should consult with the weird Twitter account semi-plausible birds, which actually names birds that do not exist.

Illegal Eagle, seen here in its natural environment under witness protection pic.twitter.com/hovlrgrODH

— Daniel Solis, birds suddenly appear (@DanielSolis) January 31, 2022

See them all in this extensive, image-heavy Twitter Thread. The pictures will be easier to see at Threadreader. Don't stop scrolling when he says "That's it for tonight, y'all." The thread takes up the next day for quite a few more birds. Solis says he has hundreds of them! -via Metafilter

The earth exerts gravitational force on the moon all the time; otherwise, it would fly off into space. But if something were to go wrong with our moon's orbit, what would be the effect on earth? Kurzgesagt gives us the rundown, but starts off assuaging our fears over this by insisting that it's not going to happen. As if they know for sure. Okay, the moon's been there a long time already, so let's assume that it's not going to fall anytime soon.

The good news in this theoretical scenario is that it takes a year for the moon to fall. The bad news is that conditions on earth get horribly bad really fast. This fantasy is truly apocalyptic, but stay with it; there's a surprise ending. And the video isn't quite as long as it seems, because the last two minutes are an ad. -via Digg

Bored Panda unearthed an AskReddit post about the "most interesting, bizarre, offensive, surprising" things contains in wills. The original thread contained many stories about petty and vindictive wills and family secrets revealed, but also some rather funny bequests that are worth sharing. I got a laugh out of this one:

Not a Lawyer, but an aging woman my family knew left her house(large, and in a very affluent neighborhood) and estate to family friends for so long as her cats were alive and taken care of in said house. After they died, the house was to be sold and the remaining estate donated.

The weird thing is, it's been like 20 years and the cats are still alive.

Also, they've changed color.

Ahem. While there are still some entries that smack of revenge beyond the grave or just don't make any sense at all, the funniest replies managed to float to the top in a ranked list of weird bequests you'll surely get a kick out of.

In 1964, three Polish women in Tel Aviv approached acclaimed Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal about a particularly sadistic concentration camp guard they had encountered during World War II. Hermine Braunsteiner, also known as Kobyla, worked at Majdanek and would kill children on the spot. After hearing their stories, Wiesenthal vowed to find Braunsteiner. The trail was twenty years old, but over the course of time, Wiesenthal traced Kobyla from Poland to Austria to Canada to the United States. That was a problem, because the US did not extradite Nazi war criminals.

Twenty years and several thousand miles removed from the post-war tribunals overseen by the Allied powers, the U.S. legal code contained no laws that covered Braunsteiner’s actions. Heinous as the allegations might be, the U.S. government had no way to sentence her in an American court for her crimes, which had been committed neither on American soil nor as an American citizen. If Europe wanted to hold the ex-Nazi accountable, that was Europe’s business. The only thing the U.S. could do would be to kick her out of the country, and even that seemingly straightforward matter was sneakily complex. Braunsteiner wasn’t a fugitive or an undocumented alien. No one⁠⁠—save for Simon Wiesenthal⁠⁠—was on the hunt for her. And then there was the minor matter of her American citizenship.

It was only in 1973 that Braunsteiner became the first Nazi extradited from the US, and her trial in Germany lasted until 1981. Read what happened during those long years as the wheels of justice turned slowly in a new longform article at Damn Interesting. Or you can listen to the story in podcast form at the same link.

The Harry Potter movies are beloved, but they do seem quite 20th century. This original fake trailer brings the franchise into the world of virtual reality and The Matrix! The magic is still there, but it comes in a form that's quite familiar to those who grew up on the internet. In this version, 11-year-old Harry Potter enrolls at the Hogwarts School of Hackercraft and Coding, where he learns the secrets of the deep web. The video editing and special effect are so seamless that you might be convinced that this is a real movie possibility, until you stop and realize that Daniel Radcliffe is 32 years old now. -via reddit

The United States had a spate of airline hijackings in the 1960s that gave us the term "skyjacking." They were mostly perpetrated by people who wanted to go somewhere specific, and relatively few people were hurt or killed before 2001. Norway had no such incidents before 1985, and therefore used no security measures for those boarding planes.

On June 21, 1985, Stein Arvid Huseby boarded a flight from Trondheim to Oslo with an agenda. He wanted to protest the way Norway treated ex-cons like him. He pulled a gun during the flight and warned the crew of bombs placed in the restrooms. The plane was allowed to land at Oslo, but then Huseby kept the crew and passengers hostage while he negotiated with authorities. He wanted to speak to the prime minister, the press, and various other officials about his grievances. The glitch in his cunning plan was the decent supply of beer aboard the plane. Read how that figured into the ending of the hostage crisis in Oslo at Cracked.

(Image credit: Michel Gilliand)

 

The internet introduced us all to historic photographs that we wouldn't have seen otherwise, like this image of Theodore Roosevelt riding a moose in the water. We all know he was an avid outdoorsman, but when you see this, you automatically think "Photoshop!" Still, it's just appropriate enough to be intriguing. After all, we've seen some really wild photos of President Roosevelt in his younger days. The truth is, this wasn't Photoshopped. And it is historic. But it's not real. It was manipulated in the old fashioned way, with scissors and tape.  

The picture first appeared in the New York Tribune in September of 1912. It wasn't meant to fool anyone; it was an illustration of the top three presidential candidates all riding the animal mascot of their parties: William Howard Taft on an elephant, Woodrow Wilson on a donkey, and Teddy Roosevelt on a bull moose, which was the nickname for his new Progressive Party. Yes, all three men held the office at one time or another.

This story is just one of six presidential myths debunked at Mental Floss, to get you ready for small talk on Presidents Day on February 21st.   

Turbatrix aceti is a microscopic nematode that is also called the vinegar eel. They tolerate a wide range of acidity and alkalinity, so they can live on the microbes that turn juice into vinegar. An article at LiveScience shows us how they move inside a drop of water.

After roaming the droplet randomly for the better part of an hour, some nematodes began to cluster at the center, while others swarmed to the water's edge, racing around the rim like cars in a roundabout. Soon, individual nematodes began undulating their bodies — then, others nearby started to undulate in sync.

The video was taken by physicist Anton Peshkov of the University of Rochester in New York, so of course he is fascinated with the worms' movement and synchronization while the rest of us are thinking that these icky critters are just looking for something to eat, and when they don't find it, they dance. And when they get tired of dancing, they lean on their partners. Kind of like the dance marathons of the Great Depression.             

Watching this synchronized movement is all well and good, but seeing it makes me wonder if these vinegar eels are in our water supply, or in our vinegar. According to Wikipedia, they prefer feasting on mother of vinegar to anything else. They are neither parasitic nor dangerous, but American manufacturers of vinegar pasteurize the product and filter out nematodes before the vinegar goes to market. -via Damn Interesting

A quick thread on in the importance of being careful what data you share - even if you're the Queen. Today, Her Maj tweeted this lovely picture, gor bless er, etc. You might think that the contents of the red box would be official business. And you'd be right. 1/6 pic.twitter.com/y1RspNRUzy

— Adam Kay (@amateuradam) February 6, 2022

Queen Elizabeth is celebrating 70 years on the throne, which is a record for the British monarchy. They call this a platinum jubilee, although they could have called it anything since it's never been done before. There are a lot of celebrations and events planned, and the Queen has released quite a few photographs lately. Adam Kay noticed that there are some documents visible in this one. Can we possibly find out what they are?

A quick click of the Perspective Warp function on Photoshop gets it looking a little bit squarer. 3/6 pic.twitter.com/yWm2L2Ycnn

— Adam Kay (@amateuradam) February 6, 2022

The rule of thumb is to check the background of any photograph before you post it, because people will pick around in the corners. We really don't expect Her Majesty to use anything vulnerable to national security concerns as a photo prop, but we can't help but be curious. A shopping list? A fan letter? A will? Kay is working with a larger version of the photo, so he was able to enhance quite a bit to reveal the contents of the top document. Artificial intelligence may or may not have been involved. To see what was revealed, you'll need to read the 6-Tweet thread starting here. -via Fark

Ernest Shackleton led a 1914 expedition to Antarctica, but the crew didn't make it back until 1916 after their ship, the Endurance, was trapped in ice and later crushed by it. The ship hasn't been seen since, although there have been several attempts to find it. This weekend, a science crew is sailing from Cape Town to the Weddell Sea armed with robotic submarines, a helicopter, an ice drill, and other hi-tech equipment to find the remains of the Endurance. They don't know whether the shipwreck is in any way identifiable or if it is a scattering of small pieces. Read about the quest at BBC and keep up with the expedition's progress at the Endurance22 Expedition website.

Captain James Cook of the British Royal Navy is most famous for leading the first European contact with Australia in 1770 and with Hawaii in 1778. Cook's ship the HMS Endeavour carried him across the Pacific several times, and was then sunk off the coast of Rhode Island in 1778, although without Cook. Fast forward to the 21st century, and a collaboration between two organizations may have found the wreckage of the Endeavour. The Australian Maritime Museum has been working with the Rhode Island Marine Archaeology Project (Rimap) to locate and identify the ship. On Thursday, Kevin Sumption, director of the Australian museum announced that a shipwreck has been identified as the Endeavour. Dr. Kathy Abbass, head of Rimap, said the announcement was premature and that there was no “indisputable data” to prove it. In addition, Rimap accused the museum of breach of contract in making the announcement. You can read about the dispute at the Guardian.

In October of 1944, 300 American warships pretty much destroyed the Japanese navy in the Battle of Leyte. At the same time, in another area off the coast of the Philippines, a smaller American force fought ferociously against a larger Japanese flotilla. In that smaller battle, the Americans lost five of their 13 ships. One that sunk was the USS Johnston. It sank into the Philippine Trench, which is so deep that the fish living at bottom didn't even bother to develop eyes or muscles. It was thought to be impossible to find the wreck of the USS Johnston until wealthy explorer Victor Vescovo became interested. He assembled a team to develop a submarine that could go that deep and be used again. The result was a sub called The Limiting Factor that found the Johnston in 2021- at a depth of 21,180 ft (6,460 m), making it the deepest shipwreck ever found. Read that story at BBC Future.