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)

Melissa Miller started a project called Bad Science Jokes back in 2012 when she was in high school. She had a science teacher that would give extra credit for a science joke, and so she saw and heard a lot of them. Her collection was very popular on Tumblr, and then moved to Instagram. Some consider it just a meme page, but she also hears from students who credit the jokes in helping them to remember important concepts to get through science class.



Bored Panda picked out a bunch of these jokes that are both funny and understandable to anyone with a passing knowledge of science. See 40 of them in a list ranked by votes. Some of them are actually good science jokes!

The Nazi party in 1930s Germany was all about convincing the majority of Germans that they were superior to Jews and foreigners because of their racial purity. This led to an entire scientific discipline out to prove that theory, and the mad race to find evidence to support it.  

Those who swore by the idea of a white Nordic superior race were believers in the tale of the imagined lost city of Atlantis, where people of "the purest blood" had apparently once lived. Believed to have been situated somewhere between England and Portugal in the Atlantic Ocean, this mythical island allegedly sunk after being struck by a divine thunderbolt.

All the Aryans who survived had supposedly moved on to more secure places. The Himalayan region was believed to be one such refuge, Tibet in particular because it was famous for being "the roof of the world".

In 1935, Himmler set up a unit within the SS called the Ahnenerbe - or Bureau of Ancestral Heritage - to find out where people from Atlantis had gone after the bolt from the blue and the deluge, and where traces of the great race still remained and could be discovered.

In 1938, he sent a team of five Germans to Tibet on this "search operation".

The Germans were reportedly there to study zoology and anthropology, all the while taking casts of human body parts and measuring skulls and features of the local people, before the war cut their research short. Read about the Tibetan adventures of Himmler's research team at BBC. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: German Federal Archives)

YouTuber Paulogia Live asked the Question, "If every copy of Star Wars was destroyed, could we recreate A New Hope from non-Lucasfilm projects?" And then he answered the question himself, by editing together a shorter but comprehensive version of Star Wars Episode One: A New Hope using parodies, tributes, and cultural references found in movies, TV shows, YouTube videos, ads, and other media that are not from Lucasfilm. The effect is somewhat like Star Wars Uncut, except you'll recognize most of the clips used here.  -via Boing Boing

Long ago, four mysterious beings, who were both male and female, sailed from Tahiti to Hawaii and brought the art of healing with them. They were named Kapuni, Kinohi, Kahaloa, and Kapaemahu. The Hawaiians erected four great boulders in their honor at Waikiki, which are still there. Their story is told in this beautiful animated short by Hinaleimoana Wong-Kalu featured in the 2021 PBS Short Film Festival. Read more about the film at The Kid Should See This.

Dolls can be creepy, especially when they are staring at you in the middle of the night from the top of the dresser. But there are a few dolls that have become famous for their activities in addition to their appearance. These real-life dolls have a reputation for inspiring terror. Whether the stories are real or not, the dolls are, even though one was also a movie character.

Twilight fans will recall that the film series concluded with the birth of the offspring of fang-crossed lovers Bella and Edward. In The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn—Part 1 (2011), their baby, Renesmee, was represented by some questionable CGI. On set, she was embodied by a very peculiar-looking animatronic doll (above). That prop is now being accused of malevolent sentience by people near the Forever Twilight display at the Chamber of Commerce in Forks, Washington, where the movies are set.

“One day she might be standing up straight, and the next, when you come in on another day, she’s in a weird position,” Lissy Andros, executive director of the Chamber of Commerce, told Jezebel in 2020. “It’s like, is she moving around in there? We don’t know. But we tell everybody that the [display case] cover is on her for their protection.”

Fortunately, Renesmee appears to be decomposing as a result of the fragile materials used to build her, so she likely won’t be around to disturb people for too much longer.

Read the stories of seven such haunted dolls, and see several videos on them, at Mental Floss.

Since 2015, Egypt has been busy building a new, planned city to replace Cairo as the nation's capital. The first buildings may be completed in 2022, but the first phase of moving the government in won't begin until 2030. The unnamed city is designed to be clean, efficient, sustainable, and will have plenty of room to grow into the future.

The goal of this new city, which is currently going by the placeholder name “New Administrative Capital (NAC)” is to relieve the congestion of Cairo, one of the world’s most crowded cities, with a “smart traffic” system, as well as solve many of its other problems. It already has a park twice the size of New York’s Central Park and the new capital has also committed to “allocate 15 square metres of green space per inhabitant (the project is being sold as a green initiative to tackle pollution). Its downtown is to have skyscrapers, including the Oblisco Capitale, designed in the form of a Pharaonic obelisk at a height of 1,000 metres (3,300 ft), becoming the tallest in the world; and the Iconic Tower, which will be the tallest tower in Africa. The city will also have artificial lakes, about 2,000 educational institutions, a technology and innovation park, 663 hospitals and clinics, 1,250 mosques and churches, a 90,000-seat stadium, 40,000 hotel rooms, a major theme park four times the size of Disneyland and 90 square kilometers of solar energy farms. They have also built the 2nd biggest mosque in the world (after the one in Mecca) and the biggest church in the middle East.

While Egypt as a whole is embracing the new city, there are still some questions to be resolved. How much influence will the financiers have, specifically the Egyptian military and foreign investors? And what will happen to Cairo's poor? Read about the new Egyptian capital city at Messy Nessy Chic.

(Image credit: Youssef Abdelwahab)

As a commenter from Estonia said, there's no reason for any of us to be interested in British river crossings, but Tom Scott makes them interesting anyway. The two ferries and a bridge operate in weird ways because they are governed by laws that are over a century old, from the days when people didn't have cars. Could they change the laws? Maybe, but they apparently don't want to bother. -via reddit

Nikon's annual Small World Photomicrography Competition has announced its winners for 2021! This is the 47th year for the competition, with first place going to Jason Kirk of the Baylor College of Medicine in Texas for the image you see above.

This year’s first place prize was awarded to Jason Kirk for his striking image of a southern live oak leaf’s trichomes, stomata and vessels. Using various lighting techniques and design tools, Jason’s final image is a masterful example of the dynamic relationship between imaging technology and artistic creativity. Using a custom-made microscope system that combines color filtered transmitted light with diffused reflected light, Jason captured around 200 individual images of the leaf and stacked them together to create the stunning image.

Second place went to Esmeralda Paric and Holly Stefen of Macquarie University in Australia for this image of 300,000 or so networking neurons.

Frank Reiser of Nassau Community College in New York won third place for this picture of a rear leg and trachea of a louse. 

See the top 20 images in this gallery, and click on each to read more about them. See more in the honorable mentions gallery.

-via Metafilter

The colonial guns of the British Empire terrified and subdued cultures around the globe. The same happened when Samuel Wallis landed in Tahiti, the first European to sail there. His show of force subdued the Tahitians who did not want to be claimed by Britain, but it had a different effect on an ambitious young man named Mai. Although wounded, Mai could only think of how useful those guns could be in reclaiming his home island from invaders from Bora Bora. It was a long journey from that day to sitting for the above portrait in England.

The portrait’s subject—Mai, or Ma‘i—was the first South Seas Islander ever to visit England. He arrived from Tahiti in 1774, as part of the second voyage of the celebrated navigator James Cook, and stayed in Great Britain for two years. It was a cross-hemispheric anthropological experiment that in many ways succeeded, but one that was also tinged with tragedy. In London, Mai became a sensation, a star of the press, the darling of the intelligentsia, the subject of poems, books, musical plays—and a curiosity that some of the country’s finest artists sought to paint. It’s doubtful whether any other non-European figure had inspired English portraitists to put so much oil on canvas. Indeed, few Indigenous persons had ever been so widely or vividly described, analyzed and documented by European society.

But the man immortalized on canvas was not quite the man who posed for Joshua Reynolds’ 1775 or 1776 portrait. Back in Tahiti, a society with a highly stratified system of social classes, Mai was a manahune, a commoner, powerless and impoverished. There was nothing regal or patrician about Mai; he was a nobody who happened to hitch an epic ride to England, a regular guy who went on a most excellent adventure—all of which makes his story even more spectacular.

Somehow, the young man who hitched a ride to England became royalty by the time he arrived, and Mai was smart enough to avoid correcting those assumptions. Read Mai's story at Smithsonian.

Here's something that will surely lift your spirits! Listen to "Ordinary Day" joyously performed by Alan Doyle and the Shallaway Youth Choir.

Ordinary Day is a song that reminds us about the power of positivity and the beauty of overcoming life's biggest obstacles. As we look for our new normal, we’re grateful for kids and youth and the example of resilience they continue to show us every day.

-via Nag on the Lake

Janelle Shane works with artificial intelligence algorithms, and when she sees something weird or funny, she tells us about it on her blog AI Weirdness. For the third year in a row, she is challenging her readers to produce art for October, or as the algorithm calls it, "Botober." You can see art inspired by Shane's AI-generated prompts in previous years here. 

This year, five different algorithms have produced lists of art prompts that should inspire you to create something really strange in the categories of animals, Halloween, more Halloween, more animals, and landscapes. Check them all out, and when you've done your part, post your contributions to social media and tag them with #botober.

"Won't someone think of the children?" Apparently, when some people think of children, it's to protect them from the real world, even at an age when we should be preparing them for it. When a child has developed the skills to read general circulation books, there's really no controlling what they will read, and many parents are just glad they are reading at all. But time and again, people try to limit what students are exposed to in school libraries and reading lists. Books by Judy Blume have been a particular target over the years.

2. Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret

There's something about books depicting the real young adult experience that upsets people—which perhaps explains why so many Judy Blume books get challenged or banned. In the ‘90s, five Blume books were on the most frequently banned list: Forever, Blubber, Deenie, Tiger Eyes, and Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret. Published in the 1970s, Are You There God explores the challenges of growing into yourself as a young girl, and it's often challenged, mainly because it talks about puberty and teenage sexuality. In 1982, the Fond du Lac school district in Wisconsin challenged the novel for being “sexually offensive and amoral.” In fact, Blume even wrote about how she donated three copies to her children’s school, but “the male principal decided that the book was inappropriate because of the discussion of menstruation”—you know, something every teenage girl deals with. (Although it's arguably better than when Forever was banned for depicting “disobedience to parents.”)

The reasons for banning other books are even weirder, from the word "sweat" to a possible connection to other books by a completely different author. Read the stories of eleven of those books at Mental Floss.

What happens when the software Cyriak Harris uses to animate his disturbing ideas decides to crash? Well, he's not going to let that stop him! In this video, Cyriak uses meatspace tools to construct his own animation machine, complete with his signature style of movement and general weirdness.

Sometimes you see an opportunity to make a statement or a visual pun and you just can't help yourself, right? Well, we don't condone vandalism, but sometimes we can appreciate it. Even so, most of these images gleaned from the subreddit Mildly Vandalized are harmless. Some could even be called "street art" or "enhancements." Some just correct spelling or grammar on a sign that asking for it, and others are just captions added with a Post-it Note or something.    



See 37 such public "enhancements" that will make you smile at Buzzfeed.