People have been using farts to tell jokes, insult others, play one-upmanship, and entertain crowds for as long as there have been people. Neatorama has built a reputation for fart coverage, so a list of the world's most memorable farts is catnip to us! These farts are presented in chronological order, which gives us a kind of history of flatulence, but there are more modern stories because the internet operates without the kind of filter our mothers tried to instill in us. But fart humor goes way back. One butt bomb started a war!

In Egypt in 570 BCE, a fart changed everything. King Apries had angered his people and was worried about a mutiny, sending one of his best generals, Amasis, to calm things down. However, the mutineers decided Amasis would be king instead, and he was into it. When Apries sent a messenger to bring Amasis back, Amasis farted and instructed the messenger to take that back to the king. This led to a battle, a defeat, and a new farting bottom on the throne.

The list of 20 memorable farts at Mental Floss actually has more than 20 fart stories, with links in case you don't believe them.

The Takeout takes Halloween candy very seriously, so they've compiled a seven-week deep dive into the top Halloween treats. Each week, a different facet of the top ten candies will be ranked and explained, and the data will lead to the ultimate ranking before Halloween, so that you can purchase the very best candies for trick-or-treaters. Or yourself. America's top ten most popular Halloween candies are:

Skittles
Reese’s Cups
Starburst
M&Ms
Hershey’s Miniatures (Hershey, Mr. Goodbar, Krackel)
Twix
Snickers
Sour Patch Kids
Tootsie Pops
Jolly Ranchers   

In week one, they ranked the candies by their wrappers, which, you must admit, are part of the experience. In week two, they ranked them by the nostalgia factor. Check back on Friday for the third ranking. Of course, we all know who will win in the overall competition: Reece's Cups. There can be no doubt.

German theorist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach studied and wrote of racial hierarchies more than 200 years ago. He posited that the epitome of racial superiority were the people of the Caucasus Mountains, particularly the region of Circassia, which is why we use the word "Caucasian" today. In the US in the 19th century, putting the word Circassian in front of any beauty product meant it would sell well. In 1865, as Americans were dealing with issues of race at the end of the Civil War, P.T. Barnum debuted his first Circassian Beauty, a woman named Zalumma Agra.    

A staple of dime museums and traveling shows throughout the nineteenth century, Circassian beauties were alleged to be from the Caucasus Mountain region, and were famous for both their legendary looks and their large, seemingly Afro-textured hairstyles. The Circassian beauty was an attraction that required audiences to hold a number of ultimately unresolvable stereotypes in tension with each other. These women were presented as chaste, but were also billed as former harem slaves. They were supposedly of noble lineage but appeared as sideshow attractions. And they were displayed to predominantly white audiences for an exoticism that traded on hair associated with Black women, which came coupled with the paradoxical assurance that, being Caucasian, Circassian beauties represented the height of white racial “purity”.

Zalumma Agra came with a perfectly exotic backstory as a Circassian slave rescued from Turkey, but more likely she was a white performer who had super-curly hair. Or, as seen in later versions of the Circassian Beauty, she altered her hair to fit the part. But the fact that these acts lasted into the 20th century reveals the audience's fascination with race and the politics that surround it. Read the history of the sideshow Circassian Beauties at the Public Domain review. -via Nag on the Lake

A year ago, we told you about a real-life Willy Wonka scheme. David “Candyman” Klein hid golden tickets in each state for a treasure hunt that would lead up to awarding someone with a candy factory. That someone is Andrew Maas, who followed clues for a year and ultimately found the last golden ticket at a park in Kokomo, Indiana.   

Maas registered his find on the treasure hunt website. Twenty minutes later, Klein called him while he was still in Highland Park and told him he had won. He had just won the candy factory.

Maas was floored. He now owned the plant, which makes an edible sand-art treat called Sandy Candy, along with other sweet concoctions. But he knew he couldn’t pick up his wife and two kids and move them to Florida to run the business.

Instead, the two are now working on an agreement in which Klein gives him the factory and then buys it back from him. Maas said he’s fine with whatever the agreement turns out to be.

Maas said the excitement and adventure of the treasure hunt was the real draw, but he's glad to have the money. Read how Kokomo was chosen for the final destination, and how Maas solved the clues to find it at the Kokomo Tribune.  -via Fark 

On the side of a mountain in the north of Italy stood a small village named Consonno. It didn't even have a road leading to it, which is eventually important to the story. Wealthy entrepreneur Mario Bagno had a dream of building the ultimate resort, akin to Las Vegas, in Italy, so he set his sights on Consonno. Bagno built accommodations and entertainment facilities and opened the resort in 1967. Today, all that's left is an impressive collection of abandoned buildings, which we will take a video tour of while we learn the story of Consonno. -via Digg

The Filibuster Movement, or filibusterism, of the 19th century was an outgrowth of the idea of Manifest Destiny. There were many who believed that Americans were destined by their superiority to expand across the continent, or even further, to bring civilization to the New World. Filibusters were men who dared to pursue this by invading other nations with their own private forces independent of the US government. The most noted among them was William Walker. In 1853, Walker decided to claim some land in Mexico.

Now, invading a country with whom the U.S. was at peace may seem like it would be breaking laws, and that would be correct. It was a direct violation of the Neutrality Act. This did not stop Walker, though, who recruited a small group of adventure seekers (who were really just looking for opportunities after failing to get rich from the Gold Rush) and found a ship to sail from the Bay Area to Baja California in Mexico. His original ship was taken by the American military, which was cracking down on filibusters, but the ambitious Walker simply found another and snuck away with a makeshift army of fewer than 50 men.

On November 3, 1853, after landing in Baja California, Walker captured the state capital of La Paz and proclaimed the region the Republic of Lower California. The new country, which was never recognized as a country, needed a leader, and Walker was, naturally, made the president. This invasion may have been viewed as highly illegal by both American and Mexican authorities, but the American public loved it. Filibusters were cool. They embodied Manifest Destiny in a way that no one else did. Because of this support, people actually traveled to Mexico to join Walker’s territory.

Walker's adventures in Mexico ended when he overstepped his bounds, but he had more luck in Nicaragua, where he was recognized as president for a while. He also invaded Honduras. Read the story of William Walker and his temporary conquests at Cracked.

Image: The Costa Rica National Monument depicts five nations chasing William Walker out of Central America. Photo by Mariordo (Mario Roberto Durán Ortiz).

Royal Museums Greenwich, home of the Royal Observatory, has announced the winners of their annual Astronomy Photographer of the Year competition. The grand prize goes to Shuchang Dong, who traveled to Tibet to get this image of the solar eclipse of 2020, titled The Golden Ring. To his dismay, it was a cloudy day, but the heavens opened up just long enough to get this picture of the corona.  

The winner in the Stars and Nebulae category is British photographer Terry Hancock for this image called California Dreamin' NGC 1499. See the winners in each of eight categories plus two other awards, with links to other photographs in the shortlist for each category.

Mike Judge made a pilot for a show called Monsignor Martinez (Las Dias Y Los Noches de Monsignor Martinez) and it's only 20 years later that we get to see it. Well, at least the live-action version. The animated version is a recurring bit in the show King of the Hill. Monsignor Martinez is a Catholic priest who kills drug smugglers. Yeah, it's an action series. I would watch this religiously! -via reddit

Whether a Jeopardy! question is difficult or not all depends on whether you know the answer. If you know a bit of trivia that the three contestants on TV at the time don't know, that makes you a champion, right? Esquire gives us a second chance to outdo those contestants.

Below, we’ve rounded up 20 Jeopardy questions that fall in a rare and ignominious category called “triple stumpers”—a.k.a., legendarily hard questions. A triple stumper is a clue for which no correct response is given by any player. That can mean a few things: either some or all of the players buzz in incorrectly, or no one buzzes in at all.

Be warned that each answer is printed right below the question, so you should control your scrolling to avoid spoilers. I got about half of them, but whether I would be faster than the next contestant is unlikely. See all 20 questions here, and don't miss the video in which three intellectual contestants prove they know nothing about football. -via Digg

If this were a list, you could argue about it. Well, some people will argue about it anyway, even though it's a compilation and should just be enjoyed as such. Looper takes a look at the more ridiculous scenes over the different series of the Star Trek Universe. You may think that the setup for each scene is a little long, but if they didn't explain what was happening, we'd either be confused or else the video would be more than an hour long. -via Laughing Squid

Bone Discovery Suggests Humans Were Already Manufacturing Clothes 120,000 Years Agohttps://t.co/HAIURNkU9c

— ScienceAlert (@ScienceAlert) September 17, 2021

Pinpointing when humans started wearing clothes is tricky, as leather, fur, and textiles tend to rot completely away. However, we can find hints in the tools people used to make clothing. A team headed by Emily Hallett of the Max Planck Institute has been excavating a cave in Morocco that has yielded some 12,000 bone fragments. Some of those bones, dated to around 120,000 years ago, have markings that match newer bones from other sites that were used to skin animals for fur and leather. In addition to these bone tools, other animal bones suggest that the people who lived there ate herbivores and just skinned carnivores.   

"In this cave there are three species of carnivores with skinning marks on their bones: Rüppell's fox, golden jackal, and wildcat," Hallett told ScienceAlert.

"The cut marks on these carnivore bones are restricted to areas where incisions are made for fur removal, and there are no cut marks on the areas of the skeleton associated with meat removal."

While for leather, several species of bovid were found at the site.

"Hartebeest, aurochs, and gazelle bones were found in high abundance in the cave, and these animals were also consumed by humans, because there are cut marks associated with meat removal on their bones," added Hallett.  

These are the oldest leather working tools yet found. However, genetic studies in lice suggest that head lice and clothing lice diverged around 170,000 years ago, which may mean there are even earlier leather working tools to be found somewhere. Read about the discovery at ScienceAlert. -via Strange Company

At the turn of the 20th century, scientists knew about contagion, but the concept of an asymptomatic carrier was completely new. How could someone spread a disease when they weren't sick? We can't say that Mary Mallon, also known as Typhoid Mary, was the first asymptomatic carrier, but she was the first that health officials knew about. Determining how all these wealthy families families came to contract typhoid would be easy now, since they all hired the same cook, but inspectors at the time were looking for actual sick people or bacteria in the water supply. George Thompson owned a vacation house in which the Warren family became sick, and he was determined to find the source to protect future renters.  

Desperate to get to the bottom of the puzzle, Thompson hired George Soper, thirty-seven-year-old freelance civil engineer who had been investigating typhoid outbreaks in well-to-do families. After learning that the Warrens had hired a new cook, who no longer worked with them, Soper had his suspicions. Soper was able to trace Mary's employment history back to 1900. He found that typhoid outbreaks had followed Mary from job to job. From 1900 to 1907, Soper found that Mary had worked at seven jobs in which 22 people had become ill, including one young girl who died with typhoid fever shortly after Mary had come to work for them.

Soper tracked Mary down to her new place of employment, the family of Walter Bowens, who lived on Park Avenue. There was typhoid in the residence too. Soper found that two of the household's servants were hospitalized, and the daughter of the family had died of typhoid.

Soper confronted Mary in the kitchen of the Bowens, and asked her to give samples of her urine and stool. This infuriated Mary. Grabbing a carving fork from the table, Mary chased Soper out of the house. Sopher tried again, this time in the apartment of a man Mary was spending time with. Mary threw Sopher out again, swearing the whole way.

If she had cooperated, the name Mary Mallon might only be known in science and medical circles, but she fought quarantine for years and became so notorious that her nickname is still used for people who spread disease. Read the story of Typhoid Mary at Amusing Planet. 

Superman? I’m just your daily journalist #NFID22 pic.twitter.com/0aL2Awnac8

— Ronith Arum (@ronitharum) September 14, 2021

North Farmington High School in Farmington Hills, Michigan, (previously and previously) has a tradition of letting their senior class wear what they want for their student identification cards. They've been doing it since 2014, and the incoming seniors plan their costumes long ahead of time. The class of 2022 has received their ID cards, and the students have posted them to Twitter.

“Mulan you will NEVER bring your family honor” @nfhs2022 #NFID22 pic.twitter.com/GU5tJ2xQxM

— jess💍. (@jessicawang23) September 14, 2021

#NFID22@nfhs_2022

I’m scared, she hasn’t gotten her muffin yet… pic.twitter.com/KspJB9B2Ht

— Em ⁷ 🏳️‍🌈 🎗 (@LittleJelly469) September 14, 2021

“I NEED A HERO” #NFID22 #nfhs_22 pic.twitter.com/lA5bIRv0eq

— Leah (@Leah09086642) September 14, 2021

Even one of the teachers got into it!

I threatened for years….I bring you @britneyspears #FreeBritney #NFID22 pic.twitter.com/oKOgDgicNY

— NFHS Engineering (@NFHSEngArch) September 14, 2021

You can check out all the ID cards that have been posted with the hashtag #NFID22. Or see a gallery of the best ones in a list at Bored Panda.

We all know George Washington, Father of our Country, Commander of the Continental Army which defeated the British Empire to create the first modern democracy. He was the most famous and most respected man of his time among the 13 states, and so Americans elected him to the presidency twice. But do you recall exactly what Washington did while he was in office? He had his work cut out for him, as the young nation's government was fairly unorganized, and the states worked as if they were all separate countries. Washington went to the people, to sell them on the idea of putting "United" before "States."

Washington took his show on the road in the spring of 1789. Over the span of two years, he visited all 13 original states (14 if you count Maine, which was then part of Massachusetts), traveling on horseback and by carriage along rutted dirt roads and over rising rivers. The president often donned his magnificent Continental Army uniform and rode his favorite white stallion into towns, where he was greeted by cheering citizens. Along the way, he communicated his hopes for the new nation and how he needed everyone’s support to make this vision reality.

“It was awe inspiring,” Philbrick says. “Washington was seriously the only one [who] could have sold the concept to the people. Not only was [he] able to unify us politically, he was able to unify us as a nation. Instead of saying our state is our country—as was customary back then—we were saying the United States is our nation. We take that for granted today, but it wasn’t that way when Washington took office in 1789.”

Get an idea of how the new nation came together under the leadership of Washington on his road trip at Smithsonian.

Some celebrities find no rest in death. There are plenty of people who want just a little piece (or more) of a famous body for one reason or another. That's to be expected if one becomes a saint, but keeping body parts around is not limited to religious icons. When Galileo's remains were moved to a new tomb in 1737, several pieces were snatched up along the way. One of the scientist's fingers ended up in a museum, and a stolen vertebra eventually went to the University of Padua. That left two missing fingers and a tooth unaccounted for.

Galileo’s tooth and the other two fingers didn’t leave such an obvious trail. The original thief, an Italian marquis, bequeathed them to his progeny, and they stayed in the family for generations. But the last written reference to the artifacts was from 1905, and historians later in the 20th century assumed they were gone for good. Then, in 2009, two fingers and a tooth showed up in a jar at an auction in Italy. The auction organizers didn’t know whose body parts they were selling, but the buyer had an inkling that they were Galileo’s. They brought their purchase to the Institute and Museum of the History of Science, where museum director Paolo Galluzzi confirmed the theory.

He based his verdict on the fact that the items and their container matched the detailed description from 1905. And since the objects were unlabeled and sold for a scant sum, it seemed unlikely that someone had produced them in some kind of bizarre counterfeiting scheme. As Galluzzi told CNN, “[The] story is so convincing I cannot think of a reason not to believe it.” After renovations, the museum reopened in 2010 under a new name—the Galileo Museum—which proudly exhibited Galileo’s two shriveled digits (and lone tooth) next to the finger already on display.  

Read the stories behind ten corporeal relics of historical figures at Mental Floss, or you can listen to a video telling the same tales.

(Image credit: Marc Roberts)