In one way, this is the story of a highly respected physician, Dr. Jim Lee, who treated AIDS patients in the early '80s when other doctors wanted nothing to do with the "gay epidemic." He was a star among his patients, and became well-known in Los Angeles. In another way, this is the story of a unique drug. In 1996, Serostim was approved to treat the wasting away that plagued AIDS patients towards the end of their lives, at a cost of $75,000 a year, although its maker Serono Labs eventually lowered the price somewhat. Serostim is essentially human growth hormone (HGH), which is very popular among body builders and people who believe it may extend their lives, but cannot be prescribed for those conditions.

But for Serono, the timing of the drug’s introduction was inauspicious. Effective combinations of antiretroviral drugs designed to combat AIDS had just been approved, leading to massive decreases in deaths from the virus. Serostim’s “use as an HIV drug was limited by the fact that wasting is a really late-stage manifestation of AIDS,” says Ng, the immunologist. Advances in other therapies soon meant that the symptom Serostim was meant to treat rarely presented.

In response, Serono launched a marketing blitz. In 1997, it trained sales representatives to broadly “redefine AIDS wasting,” developing an unapproved device to measure “body cell mass” so that more HIV patients would qualify for Serostim. In 2001, federal prosecutors filed a suit against Serono on charges of filing false claims, or illegally promoting the sale of a medication. The firm pled guilty to charges related to bringing a group of American doctors on an all-expenses-paid trip to Cannes, France, in exchange for prescribing Serostim. The suit was settled in April 2005; Serono was ordered to pay more than $700 million. Sullivan, the U.S. attorney in Boston, told The New York Times that 85 percent of all Serostim prescriptions were unnecessary.

There were still ways to sell Serostim, even to those who wanted it for off-label purposes, which involved cash-strapped AIDS patients, insurance companies, and Dr. Jim Lee. You can read (or listen to) that story at Narratively. -via Damn Interesting

The USPS has released a new postage stamp that appears to be a coded message. Each stamp contains twenty panels that spell out a message. It's not really a code, though, but an artistic font that's easy to decipher if you take the time to see each letter. Appropriately, the dedication ceremony was held at the International Spy Museum in Washington, DC.

“As you add these stamps to your collection, or use them to send a message to your family and friends — we hope they will appeal to the puzzle-solver in all of us,” said Robert M. Duncan, a member of the U.S. Postal Service Board of Governors, who served as dedicating official for the ceremony.

Joining Governor Duncan for the ceremony were Tamara Christian, the Spy Museum’s president and chief operating officer; Rebecca Roberts, curator of programming, Planet Word; and an “international spy” as a special guest.

Read more about the stamp at the Postal Service's website. -via Boing Boing

Last year we shared the Instagram account Subpar Parks, in which Amber Share illustrates one-star reviews of US National Parks. Now Share has turned her collection of reviews into a book called Subpar Parks: America's Most Extraordinary National Parks and Their Least Impressed Visitors. It contains reviews in both text and illustrations, plus commentary from the author. All 63 US National Parks are included, plus some national monuments, recreation areas, and other areas under the Park Service's umbrella.  

The Raleigh, North Carolina-based designer had some strict criteria when it came to determining which reviews to use in her illustrations. She looked for reviews that predated the project; once it took off, people began to plant fake reviews to get her attention. Then, she tried to weed out any sarcastic ones, and others that criticized park management or administration.

“I really try to focus in on people just criticizing nature because that, to me, is what keeps it funny and light,” she says. “You could go on all day about the ways that Zion manages the shuttle system, and that’s not really what this is about. But somebody who thinks the scenery of Zion is distant and impersonal is really what gets me.”

See a half-dozen such reviews and what Share thinks about them at Smithsonian.

You've heard the phrase, "If you love the law and you love sausage, you don't want to see either one being made." Well, sausages begin with the pig, and learning unsavory details about pigs may put you off sausage for a while. And ham and bacon. Ze Frank lays out all the unpleasantness for us, and still manages to make us laugh.

In 1891, 14-year-old Michael Zoettl was recruited to become a Benedictine monk, and was sent from his home in Bavaria to Cullman, Alabama, to live at St. Bernard’s Abbey. Now called Brother Joseph, he studied to be a priest until an accident left him so hunchbacked that his superiors decided he would never have his own parish. Zoettl labored at the abbey, and filled his free time making miniature grottos.

Using simple hand tools and found objects – bits of broken pottery, shells, leftover tiles, marbles, chicken wire – he branched out from tiny grottos into a model of the city of Jerusalem, which he installed in the monastery’s garden in 1912. Originally meant just for the resident monks, Little Jerusalem soon attracted curious tourists. In fact, so many visitors arrived that the abbot told Zoettl he had to quit his little hobby because it was disturbing the monastery’s operations. Zoettl asked permission to move his creation to an old quarry on the grounds but was denied.

Eventually, the monastery embraced the tourism, and Little Jerusalem was moved and expanded. Brother Joseph worked on it until his 80s. Read the story of Little Jerusalem and the man who dedicated his life to it at Messy Nessy Chic.

(Image credit: AlabamaSouthern)

An aerial tram in Claughton, Lancashire, has been delivering rock from a quarry to the brickworks for 100 years now in a system that requires no power. This ingenious delivery course runs on gravity alone. That doesn't mean it's free, because there is some danger and important maintenance concerns, but even a computer couldn't come up with a better system. In this video, Tom Scott obviously had to let the brickworks brag about their products a little to get the interviews. Still neat.

Princess Ka‘iulani was born into the royal family of the Kingdom of Hawaii, but it was only years later that she was considered to be in line for the throne. At age 13, as the next heir apparent, she was sent to England to be educated. She didn't spend all her time there studying.

But first and foremost, the princess was a surfer. Known to ride a long wooden board, a particularly heavy and demanding one at that, she had a reputation for outstanding performance in big surf. Hawaiian women, particularly those of royal blood, were noted for their prowess and power on the waves. The Hawaiian monarchy had surfed with passion until the late 1800s, when wave riding became almost extinct as a sport. The evangelical missionaries’ religious dogma had become the preeminent cultural power in the land—and for the most part they had succeeded in removing surfing from the everyday lives of the Hawaiian people. But Princess Ka‘iulani— second in the line of succession for the Hawaiian Crown—was a notable exception. Disregarding the missionaries’ efforts to eradicate all wave-riding activities, she continued to surf daily in full defiance of the western restrictions imposed on the Hawaiian culture. “She was an expert surfrider,” recalled early 20th-century surfrider Knute Cottrell, one of the founders of the Hui Nalu surf club at Waikiki in 1908. Riding a “long olo board made of ‘wili wili’ hardwood, Ka‘iulani was the last of the traditional native surfers at Waikiki.”

Ka‘iulani was still in England when word came that her kingdom had been overthrown by American business interests. She fought back, as fiercely as a 17-year-old princess could. Read the story of Crown Princess Ka‘iulani at Atlas Obscura.

It's bad enough when two scientists become obsessed with outdoing the other, but it's even worse when they go out of their way to undermine each other. That was fairly easy for O.C. Marsh, as his rival Edward Drinker Cope made plenty of mistakes, but Cope was always willing to fight back. The rivalry between the two made headlines and brought the science of dinosaur fossils into the public consciousness, so it was at least good for something.  

Wombats are Australian marsupials, which you know come in all sorts of strange shapes and lifestyles. You might be surprised at how large a wombat can be, or how fast they run. Wombat poop is oddly cube-shaped, and research has figured out how that happens. Matthew Inman at The Oatmeal explains a lot of weird things about wombats in a rather comprehensive comic, with facts that get weirder and weirder as it goes along. The real focus is on the wombat butt, which is quite unique in the animal kingdom. If you don't already know about wombat butts and how they are used, you should go and read the while thing. Or even if you already know, go see it because it's entertaining. -via Metafilter

The Soviet Union launched the first leg of the space race in October of 1957, when the satellite Sputnik 1 became the first manmade object to orbit the earth. It was soon followed by Sputnik 2. The United States made a big deal about its first satellite launch, which was on December 6, 1957. The rocket that was to deploy the satellite Vanguard 1 rose four feet and then fell back and exploded, which you can see here. In February of 1958, the US launched Explorer 1, its first successful satellite in orbit. But Vanguard got a second chance, and went into space a month later.  

Although tiny, compared to its predecessors, Vanguard 1 had quite a few mission objectives. It carried on board instruments that could measure the densities of the upper atmosphere and the electron content of the ionosphere, which was then used to determine the effect of the space environment on a satellite. It also obtained geodetic measurements through orbit analysis, and these proved that the Earth was indeed pear-shaped with the stem at the North Pole. The launch itself was a test to determine the launch capabilities of a three-stage launch vehicle as a part of Project Vanguard.

The Sputnik satellites lasted a few months each, and Explorer 1 remained in orbit for 12 years. But the Vanguard 1 satellite is still orbiting the earth 63 years later! Read the story of Vanguard, the little satellite that could, at Amusing Planet.

(Image credit: Flickr user Bruce Irving)

It's pretty neat to find examples of fictional mass media plots that eventually came true, even when you realize that movies have attempted to bring us fresh ideas for more than 120 years, and TV programming is a never-ending machine cranking out content on hundreds of channels around the clock. Still, if something happens that was predicted on TV years ago, someone will remember it. However, some of the items on this list are actually real life events that were inspired by the movies, which is still pretty neat.

Read the entire pictofacts list at Cracked. Difficulty level: none of the items are from The Simpsons.    

You already know the answer to this question: 1. It's dangerous, and 2. it doesn't work. But you want to see someone demonstrate it, right? And who better than Lauri Vuohensilta (previously), the Finnish madman who will try anything?

"...and definitely don't do this. You are going to see soon why."

Oh yeah, we need another quote here.

"Mushroom cloud is always good thing to have on nice summer day."

They end the video by burning their sauna, as one does. -via Digg

In the early Christian church, different sects interpreted the scriptures in many different ways. The second century Adamites based their culture on Adam and Eve, and lived their lives as if they existed before sin. That meant no clothing, no marriage, and no laws. They might even be seen as ancient hippies. Another thing they had in common with hippies is that they annoyed the surrounding establishment, Christian or otherwise.    

Adherents of an early Christian group in North Africa between the 2nd and 4th centuries, this forgotten society lasted longer than America is old, and was also revived hundreds of years later in the Netherlands during the Middle Ages. Various factions in Bohemia also took up the doctrines of this obscure sect, but were met with firm opposition from the mainstream churches. The Bohemian Adamites took to the practice of parading naked through towns and villages, preaching that God considered exclusive marriage to be a sin. They lived in lawlessness, maintaining that such concepts of monogamy would never had existed but for sin.

Historian Norman Cohn explains that “in this sect free love seems to have been the rule. The Adamites declared that the chaste were unworthy to enter the Messianic kingdom … The sect was much given to ritual naked dances held around a fire. Indeed, these people seemed to have spent much of their time naked, ignoring the heat and cold and claiming to be in the state of innocence enjoined by Adam and Eve.” The sect was also often criticised for “never thinking of earning their own living by the work of their hands”.

Despite occasional revivals, the Adamites were pretty much squashed out of existence all at once. Read how that happened at Messy Nessy Chic. -via Strange Company

(Image credit: Rolf Kranz)

Consumerism is what drives the economy in a capitalist society, so buying more stuff is a good thing, right? Not always. Buying more stuff than we can afford can ruin one's personal finances. Many of us end up with way more stuff than we need. All that unnecessary stuff takes a lot of energy and resources to produce, and getting rid of it overflows our landfills. So why do we buy so much stuff?     

An easy story to tell is that marketers and advertisers have perfected tactics to convince us to purchase things, some we need, some we don’t. And it’s an important part of the country’s capitalistic, growth-centered economy: The more people spend, the logic goes, the better it is for everybody. (Never mind that they’re sometimes spending money they don’t have, or the implications of all this production and trash for the planet.) People, naturally, want things.

But American consumerism is also built on societal factors that are often overlooked. We have a social impetus to “keep up with the Joneses,” whoever our own version of the Joneses is. And in an increasingly unequal society, the Joneses at the very top are doing a lot of the consuming, while the people at the bottom struggle to keep up or, ultimately, are left fighting for scraps.

That drive to keep up with the Joneses and display our status with consumer goods hasn't followed an even trajectory, as our references (meaning the people we want to keep up with) have gone through changes. Sociologist Juliet Schor explains how our buying habits have changed with the times and why at Vox. -via Digg

You've seen videos of cats vocalizing while they eat. This one, however, has a definite melody in his voice. South African musician The Kiffness noticed it, and turned it into a song.



A simple duet between a man and a cat. As you see, he couldn't help but incorporate Ievan Polkka into the mix. The "Balkan remix" went viral, and before you know it, musicians from all over the world were joining in. Continue reading to see what they did with it.