The production of glass goes back somewhere around 3500 years. Or at least we once thought so. Producing glass in those days required skilled artisans, or at least we once thought. Glass products were so expensive that they were reserved for royalty, we once thought. Scientists can tell where a glass object was made from the materials used to make or color it, we once thought. All these ideas about the origins of glass have been thrown into the wind with recent discoveries.

It's possible we will never know who invented glass, or where. The very nature of ancient glass shows that it deteriorates in humid conditions over thousands of years, so there may have been samples from its origins that simply no longer exist. Global trade in ancient times indicates that not only was glass imported, but also the raw materials once used to identify its origin. Therefore, glass found in one country, thought to be made in a second country, could have been partially made in a third country with imported ingredients from somewhere else. Partially made glass was shipped in ingots, as in the image shown above, to be remelted and fashioned by artisans into its final form elsewhere. You see how global trade in ancient times makes the story rather murky.

Throw in the fact that archaeologists once ignored evidence of glass when plundering artifacts, and modern archaeologists and material scientists have their work cut out for them. Yet modern technology that can analyze tiny samples of glass without damaging an artifact is helping scientists to learn amazing things about the ancient glass industry. Read about that line of research and what we've discovered at Smithsonian.

(Image credit: Flickr user Panegyrics of Granovetter)

Merriam-Webster’s choice for the annual Word of the Year sums up what the English-speaking world has been talking about pretty well most of the time. Last year, they selected "pandemic." For 2021, the word everyone is using and wants to know more about is "vaccine."

"Vaccine" not only encompasses what was happening in the worlds of science and medicine, it also dominated the world of politics. It also affected the lives of millions of everyday people. Online dictionary lookups for the word "vaccine" increased 601% over 2020, and 1048% over 2019. The rate of lookups has remained high since its peak in August. The word was so hot that Merriam-Webster revised and expanded its definition.      

Besides the Word of the Year, Merriam-Webster names ten other words that define the language of the year 2021. They are: insurrection, perseverance, woke, nomad, infrastructure, cicada, Murraya, cisgender, guardian, and meta. Find out what they mean and why people wanted to look them up in 2021 at the dictionary's website.

PS: the folks at the Oxford English Dictionary selected "vax" as their Word of the Year. Great minds think alike.

(Image credit: Spencerbdavis)

Richard Gere & John Travolta pic.twitter.com/IDONfT667V

— Joaquim Campa (@JoaquimCampa) November 22, 2021

Some people think that all corgis, or all German shepherds, look alike. People who have dogs know that's not true- every animal has a unique look and unique facial expressions. However, sometimes they share those unique looks with people you may recognize. Joaquim Campa collected quite a few pictures of dogs that you may have never seen before, but you'll recognize them right off.

Clint Eastwood & William H. Macy pic.twitter.com/eQDEseEeAq

— Joaquim Campa (@JoaquimCampa) November 22, 2021

Those eyes! Those cheekbones! You ought to be a star! There are a lot more of these, and even when Campa ended his thread, plenty of other people came in to post dogs (and cats) who look like celebrities.

Vladimir Putin & Richard Branson pic.twitter.com/jsCUY9t6hp

— Joaquim Campa (@JoaquimCampa) November 22, 2021

You can see the pictures from Campa's thread all together at Threadreader, but you'll also want to check out the original Twitter thread to see the extra contributions in the replies. -via Everlasting Blort

In the town of Watford, UK, city managers decided they didn't want large trucks passing through the downtown area, so they installed width restrictors. This is a set of bollards that are only seven feet wide (2.1 meters), and if your vehicle is wider, it cannot pass through. The bollards are 29 inches high, so the side mirrors on most passenger cars can pass above them. But one particular width restrictor, on Woodmere Avenue, is notorious for the number of cars, even rather small cars, that crash into the bollards. Here's a compilation of such incidents.



What causes such mayhem? Is it bad design or clueless drivers? It appears to be both. Many of these drivers look to be approaching too fast or else not paying attention. But the restrictor itself is kind of wonky. The Google Street View image at the top show us that the curb on the left acts as a ramp  that leads right to the first bollard. This is exactly the kind of non-symmetrical ramp stunt drivers use to flip cars for movies. You can see it even better in this image. Remember, in the UK, the driver is on the right side of the car.

Woodmere Avenue Crashes is a YouTube channel dedicated to the Woodmere Avenue restrictor mishaps. There's also a public Facebook group about the restrictor. You'd think after all that, the city traffic engineers would want to do something about it. -via Jalopnik

When the Japanese captured Singapore during World War II, quite a few women and children from Britain and its allies were sent to POW camps. Their husbands and fathers were sent to separate camps, and no communication was allowed between them. However, the women came up with a scheme to let their men know they were alive. They volunteered to make quilts for the Red Cross to use in the camp's hospital, where there were plenty of wounded men. They embroidered quilt pieces with designs that sent clandestine messages to their loved ones, and most importantly, they each embroidered their names on the squares. The names were enough to announce that they were still alive, and the designs were something that would mean nothing at all to a casual observer, but would to a husband, whether he saw it himself or even just heard about it from a hospitalized inmate.

For example, one embroiderer whose husband was imprisoned in the camp depicted a V, presumably for victory, and two smiling rabbits. “She had two daughters, so we think that the message was intended to let her husband know that her two daughters were well and with her.”

Other squares contain chirpy, patriotic emblems like Scottish thistles and Welsh dragons, and subtle references to King George VI. But most importantly, “every square has a name or initial: that was the main objective, just to get their name on the quilt”.

Three quilts are known to have survived Changi prison. Two are on permanent display in Australia, and the third, only recently discovered, is going on display as the British Red Cross opens a new museum in London this week. Read more about the quilts at The Guardian.  -via Nag on the Lake

(Image credit: British Red Cross Museum & Archives)

Movie fans have gone around and around for decades about whether to classify the 1988 film Die Hard as a Christmas movie. In the last couple of years, that seems to have settled down, and the general consensus is that yes, Die Hard is a Christmas movie. Just not the same way that It's a Wonderful Life or Home Alone is.

Now Den of Geek lays out the case that the 1987 film Lethal Weapon is also a Christmas movie, even more so than Die Hard. Neither film was released anywhere near Christmas, but they are both set during the holiday. The reason Die Hard was set during a Christmas party was because producer Joel Silver insisted on it, as he had for the previous year's Lethal Weapon. His reasoning was sound: any movie with Christmas decorations and Christmas music would be replayed in December, bringing in years of residuals.

Yet there is more than a temporal setting to Lethal Weapon that makes it a Christmas movie. Amid the car chases, gun battles, and general carnage, there is a subplot that takes Martin Riggs (Mel Gibson) from a suicidal wreck to a happy man with a friends, somewhat like It's a Wonderful Life. Read what makes Lethal Weapon a Christmas movie at Den of Geek.

We make fun of the Jell-O salad fad of the 20th century because 1. we think of Jell-O as a sweet treat or dessert, and 2. we can't imagine people actually liking something that's so processed and artificial. But cooks who jumped on Jell-O when it was first produced didn't see it that way. It was an affordable way to recreate the earlier, labor intensive aspic dishes that most people had never experienced. And it was natural, up to a point. Aspic, and their vegan alternatives pectin and agar, are natural products even if they were hard to get and weren't used that much before Jell-O came along.

Then after World War II, we got refrigerators and housewives, which led to ridiculously creative Jell-O recipes. Jell-O helped out by developing celery and tomato flavored gelatin. But the madness finally came to an end. You still see Jell-O salads at potlucks occasionally, but they rarely contain eggs, shrimp, or canned veggies anymore. -via Mental Floss

Colonel Henry Ludington was an American commander in the Revolutionary War based in Connecticut. There were around 400 men under his command. On April 26, 1777, Colonel Ludington received a message that the British were attacking the town of Danbury. Time to rally the troops! But since it was April, almost all of them were scattered across Connecticut and an area that is now part of New York, planting their crops. How could he possibly notify them in time?

The Colonel turned to his oldest child, Sybil, who was 16 years old. Sybil Ludington agreed to ride off and find as many soldiers as she could, in the manner that Paul Revere did a couple of years earlier. Sybil, however, had no assistants and no time to prepare as Revere did. By the time she returned, some of the Continental troops were already reporting for duty. However, Sybil was a young woman with no military status, and her feat went unrecognized for so long that we don't even know how true it is. Read about Sybil Ludington at Cracked.

(Image credit: Charlibear7)

Brothers Jim and Will Pattiz run the site More Than Just Parks, dedicated to sharing information on America's National Parks. They've tackled the task of ranking all the parks in a list that may or may not be useful to you on your future travels.  

Each of the 63 designated National Parks (National Monuments, Recreation Areas, Forests, etc. were not ranked) were rated in five equally-weighted factors: accessibility, recreation, crowds, amenities, and scenery. It's sad that a park's very attractiveness can lead to a low score due to crowds, but too many tourists can lead to dissatisfaction with the experience. In deciding whether to visit, you'll need to weigh these factors for your own purposes. If a lack of accessibility and amenities don't bother you, you could see the most glorious scenery there is, without crowds, despite a low score on this list.   

The top National Park on the list is Olympic National Park in Washington state, with a score of 48 out of 50.

My state's only National Park, Mammoth Cave, ranked abysmally. It got docked for lack of recreational activities, which is true, and for lack of scenery. Seriously, scenery? What can you expect, it's a cave! Bring lights. The park that came in dead last earned that score because it shouldn't even be a National Park. See the full list of rankings, with an explanation for each score and often a video. -via Kottke

You probably know a few things about Josephine Baker. She was an American entertainer who moved to Paris in the 1920s as a teenager and became a sensation for her singing, her cross-eyed comedy, and her dancing, particularly her notorious erotic dance in a skirt made of bananas. During World War II, Baker was a spy for the French Resistance, using her fame to bypass the scrutiny everyday French citizens had to endure. And later on, she adopted a dozen children from all over the world. Those things you know already.

But there was a lot to Baker's life in between those milestones. For instance, she got the name Baker when she married at age 15. That was her second marriage! During the war, Hermann Goering personally tried to murder her, and nearly succeeded before she made a daring escape. Read these stories and quite a bit more about Josephine Baker's astonishing life at Messy Nessy Chic.   

Kransekage means wreath cake in English. These cakes are made in Scandinavia out of concentric circles of baked marzipan, and are served for holidays and special occasions. But in Denmark, if the occasion is really special, like a wedding, the cake takes on a unique shape. This is the overflødighedshorn, or cornucopia cake, a Danish tradition since the late 1700s.



The horn of plenty, or cornucopia, symbolizes good fortune, wealth, a bountiful harvest, and generosity. These Danish wedding cakes are displayed overflowing with a bounty of fruits, candies, or smaller pastries. Overflødighedshorn is an expensive confection, painstakingly made by bakers who are artists. Each ring of the horn must be baked in just the right shape to be assembled into a gravity-defying curve, held together by a bit of chocolate. Read how they do it at Atlas Obscura.

And if you ever see a overflødighedshorn, better take a picture, because this work of art will be eaten!      

The science of artificial flavor allows us to taste things that we'd normally never eat. Prank marketing group MSCHF (previously at Neatorama) ran with that idea and offers us Illegal Chips. This is a limited-edition selection of (possibly potato) chips that come in the flavors of forbidden food. You can try horse meat chips, fugu fish chips, and casu marzu chips. Casu marzu is the Sardinian cheese that contains sheep milk and live maggots.

Wanna try these Illegal Chips out? It will cost you around $4 for a 3-ounce bag, but only until they sell out. There are risks involved, even though the chips don't contain any of the foods they purport to taste like. One the one hand, they could taste awful. On the other hand, you might find you like one of them so much that it induces a craving for a dish you can't obtain, or obtain easily.  

You can watch a video of a taste test of the fugu-flavored chips at Boing Boing.

The a cappella group Six13 (previously at Neatorama) presents their annual Chanukah production! This year, it's a medley of familiar tunes from the Broadway musical West Side Story. The six singers channel the Sharks and the Jets as they sing about the Jewish Festival of Lights and the history behind it. The video was appropriately recorded on the streets of Manhattan. While you know the songs from the 1961 movie, the newest film version of West Side Story is due in theaters on December 10. Chanukah begins at sundown on Sunday and lasts until the evening of December 6. Chag Chanukah same’ach!

PS: I have often spelled the festival as Hanukkah, but used Chanukah this time as that's the spelling that appears in the video. Both are considered correct.

The turducken is a turkey stuffed with a duck that was stuffed with a chicken, all deboned, separated only by a layer of sausage stuffing. It was a regional delicacy in Louisiana before 1996. New Orleans butcher Glenn Mistich had built somewhat of a reputation for providing turduckens, so he was enlisted to make one for legendary sports announcer John Madden. That happened when the St. Louis Rams played the New Orleans Saints on December 1, 1996. Madden was a well-known food enthusiast, and made no bones about what he found delicious as he narrated football games. Mistich went to great lengths to deliver the best turducken possible to the Superdome before the game. After a run-in with security, he delivered the dish, posed for a picture with Madden, and left.

It was an unwritten rule that Madden got to eat first, but the realization had hit that there were no utensils or napkins.

After a good 30 seconds of people scouring the booth and coming up empty, Madden couldn't take it anymore. He dug his hands into the turducken, ripping chunks off and eating them as the bemused crew laughed and asked him how it was. "I love it," Madden said between mouthfuls. "I absolutely love it."

Madden kept eating the turducken through the game, and made the dish a national phenomenon. The story of that day takes us through the history of the turducken, Mistich's method of creating them, and what that game meant for turducken chefs in the decades since. And it's pretty funny, too. Read the whole story at ESPN.  -via Digg

Plankton is a catch-all name for the tiny lifeforms that inhabit our water. They come in a ridiculous variety of sizes and shapes, but mainly two types: plants (phytoplankton) and animals (zooplankton). Within those categories are an entire encyclopedia of different plankton species, each with their own ecological niche. Plankton drift along with the current, mainly reproducing and waiting to be eaten. As they are the bottom of the food chain, they are essential to all life on earth. They also excrete oxygen as a waste product and perform other chemical processes that help to keep ocean waters healthy for other living things.

Dutch filmmaker Jan van IJken recorded different types of plankton through a microscope and assembled this gorgeous compilation of their forms. Some look like inanimate objects, while others resemble critters we  might recognize if they were bigger. A few of them may as well be aliens from a science fiction fantasy. -via Geeks Are Sexy