The Ford F-150 Lightning is a game-changer for the automobile industry. The company's signature pickup truck can now be powered by electricity, but not only that, you can power your home during emergencies with the truck battery, and you can plug your power tools into it. Ford's chief engineer for this project is Lunda Zhang, who immigrated to the US from China as an eight-year-old who spoke no English.

Outside of the terminal, her father had borrowed a car to drive the three hours from O'Hare to Indiana. The back door opened and Zhang plopped herself down into the seat of an automobile for the very first time.

"That was the first time I was ever in a car and it was just beautiful," Zhang says during an interview with The Drive. "I remember it was dark outside but there were lots of lights from the streets. Everything looked so new and so fascinating. And just to be in a car—it wasn’t even our car, it was a car my dad borrowed to come get us—it was just awesome. I felt like I was riding in a carriage, like the princess story almost."

She quickly became fluent in English, bolstered by popular TV shows like Reading Rainbow and Sesame Street, according to the Detroit Free Press. Soon, Zhang became indoctrinated in American culture. She learned about Coca-Cola and chocolate milk, as well as how the culture iconized automobiles. Specifically, she remembered being drawn to the Batmobile and the Mystery Machine from Scooby-Doo.

Read how Zhang became an automotive engineer and rose through the ranks to head Ford's electric truck project at The Drive. -via Metafilter

＼混雑状況／
お問い合わせを沢山いただくので、番台に表示を用意しました。
アヒルの数が、その時の客数です。

人力でやってますので実際とは多少ずれがありますし、刻一刻と変化もしますので、目安としてください🙏

時々ツイートでもお知らせします🐥 pic.twitter.com/O2xeQGJitO

— にんじん湯@豊橋 (@ninjinyu2021) May 31, 2021

Before you step naked into a Japanese sento, or public bathhouse, you'd probably like to know how many other naked people you'll be sharing the water with. You often won't know until you step into the bath itself, after passing through the lobby and changing room, although people have developed ways to estimate the crowd. Now, a bathhouse called Ninjinyu in Toyohashi City has unveiled a cute way to know before you undress, even if you don't read Japanese. The picture above shows a display at the front desk, where you can see that there are two ducks in the ladies pool, and six in the men's pool. This means two women and six men currently using the baths. Sora News explains how this helps everyone coming in the door. -via Fark

Our closet primate relatives -and most mammals, for that matter- are covered with fur. How did humans go hairless? And why do we have hair in the few places we do? This TED Ed lesson from Nina G. Jablonski fills us in on what we know and don't know about the way human hair evolved. -via Digg

Internet parodies can be fun, but sometimes they speak truths that are useful in the real world. This poster in the style of a comedy meme is from the National Park Service, which is dead serious about the dangers of getting too close to wildlife. In introducing the chart, PetaPixel has links and videos to numerous stories of tourists who disregarded this advice and found out. -via Nag on the Lake

Part of telling a story on the radio is describing a scene, but that can't be the punch line. It just won't come off right. Alasdair Beckett-King (previously) channels a 1940s radio announcer, Edmund Hillary-Swank, sharing modern internet memes, which doesn't quite have the same impact as seeing them. Bonus: commenters at YouTube have some more examples.

My goodness, there is what appears to be a house fire, in which a dog sits. He proclaims the situation to be fine, despite the calamity. It will not remain fine for much longer, I wager!

Here we have a meme of popular songwriter and entrepreneur Aubrey Drake Graham. In the first image he appears to be uninterested, if not actually offended, by a picture of Rowan Atkinson, but in the second image he is pointing approvingly at an unidentified, bearded ginger.

It’s quite the zoetrope, it appears to be a frog, green in colour, pedalling a unicycle, with the caption, ‘oh gosh, what do we have here?’
 
I beg your pardon, dear listeners, I've just been informed our program is being visited by the Duke of York. My my, I wonder to what we owe such a pleasure. Let me just open the door for him and -- what?? You're not the Duke! I've been bamboozled by Lord Astley yet again!

Blimey! It appears this strapping young fellow has produced a stick, only to insert it into the spokes of the very velocipede upon which he is riding. No mean feat! It is no surprise that he makes a most spectacular fall. Yes, a very peculiar man indeed; he now seems to lay blame on all his surroundings, even though his predicament is no doubt of his own volition.

Sheep can be pretty nervous, and it's not unusual for that nervousness to spread among a flock. But in 1888, it was more than just a flock, as a panic exploded across a huge sheep-raising area in England.  

The first widely recorded sheep panic occurred on the night of November 3, 1888, in Oxfordshire. Around eight o’clock, tens of thousands of sheep across an area of about 200 square miles, around the town of Reading, impulsively and simultaneously went berserk. They broke through their pens and dwellings and bolted out into the open fields, destroying property and overrunning fences as they did so. The next morning they were found widely scattered, some miles from their fields. Some of them still panting with terror under hedges, and many crowded into corners of fields.

Another such panic occurred in 1889 and again in 1893. There was no evidence of an earthquake, meteor, or human intervention. What caused the sheep panic? We still don't know for sure, but you can read about the experts' best guess at Amusing Planet. -via Strange Company

(Image credit: بدارين)

Anyone who develops a new technology is sure that it will be a hit and change the world in some way or another. The public isn't so sure, and it often takes time to win us over. There are plenty of products that turned out to be not so cool or useful (or even dangerous) in the long run, and they fell by the wayside. Then there are the products that eventually became ubiquitous, and looking at the backlash in hindsight can be a hoot.

Yeah, early predictions can be hilariously wrong, even when they come from those who have something to lose if the product succeeds. See a list of 15 such products that faced initial backlash at Cracked.

Holy Toledo! This is what you call an impactful security video. On the one hand, this is really scary because there could have been children using the pool or the trampoline. On the plus side, the pool actually saved the car, the driver, and the house as it slowed the vehicle. And the lawn was thoroughly watered. Notice the water flew so high that it took a while to run off the roof and overflow the gutters. As no one was injured in the collision, this ended up on the subreddit IdiotsInCars. -via Digg

Polygon went out and made a list of 25 dumb internet videos. I would have made a much longer list, but that would take quite a bit of time. There are definitely some classics here that will spark nostalgic joy, and some that you may have not yet seen (I was only familiar with videos older than 2018) but are worth checking out, along with commentary on each. What dumb internet videos would you add? -via Boing Boing

Have you ever wondered why the chicken is the go-to poultry of the world today? It wasn't because of Colonel Sanders. No, we need to go back further to see how the chicken supplanted ducks and geese on our tables. Back to Queen Victoria, the trendsetter (see white wedding dresses and childbirth anesthetic) and monarch of the British Empire, who popularized chicken for dinner.  

Queen Victoria, an abolitionist whose title gave her an outsize influence on trends of the day, helped make chicken a food so universally associated with wholesome nourishment that within just a few decades after her death, politicians would start promising would-be voters a “chicken in every pot.” By the time KFC franchises were spreading across the nation after World War II, all Colonel Sanders had to do to sell his deep-fried breasts, wings, drumsticks, and thighs was to promise customers that his birds were so full of fat, they’d happily lick their fingers to keep the tasty grease from running down their elbows.

The crash of hen fever in 1855 made such table manners possible, for the chicken would not have become so universally consumed if its price had remained at $700 for a breeding pair. The collapse was also a boon to Charles Darwin, who was finally able to afford enough chickens to study—Darwin’s work with chickens would inform On the Origin of Species, which was published in 1859.

But what does an evil sea captain have to do with it? That's an interesting part of the story, which you can read at Collectors Weekly.

If you remember the yucky-tasting water at Disney World, you might be tempted to think that the drinking fountains are engineered to make you buy an expensive drink instead. But my experience with central Florida is in visiting relatives in more than one location, so I thought that all of Florida had sulfurous water. Midway to Main Street explains just what happened to Florida water. Yeah, it might spur you pay through the nose for a soda, but that's not the original intent. -via Digg

In June of 1858, a ship named the Mary Russell landed at Cork Harbor in Ireland. It had returned from delivering a shipment of mules to Barbados under the command of Captain William Stewart, who had just bludgeoned seven men to death- six crew members and a sailor who had hitched a ride on the ship. Stewart didn't make any attempt to hide the murders, as he was thoroughly convinced they were planning a mutiny. There were no such plans, but the six-week journey was a descent into extreme paranoia for Stewart.   

As Stewart revealed to Scoresby later, he hadn’t originally planned to harm anyone. He had asked the men to furl the sails so he could sail on without their help, in search of a ship to rescue him from their treachery. But one had already passed them by during the battle with Howes, and a second turned away—possibly thinking the Mary Russell was a pirate ship—despite Stewart’s attempts to flag it down.

And then a new thought struck him: Surely if the crew were innocent, God would have directed the second ship to rescue them. And since death was, in Stewart’s understanding, a punishment befitting the crime of mutiny, that must be what God intended for them. That notion, together with the terror that Howes, still at large, could murder him at any moment, gave way to a sudden, sobering realization.

Stewart must kill his crew.

Read the story of the Mary Russell's journey and the trial that ensued at Mental Floss.

Before movies and television took over entertainment, anything unusual could be made into a show and taken on the road. Clarence Willard did just that, with a performance that consisted mainly up standing up straight. Willard toured with the Barnum and Bailey Circus, and later with Ripley's Believe It Or Not.

While on stage, Willard would invite a volunteer from the audience to join him, usually someone taller than him. Standing next to each other, Willard would stretch himself until he stood taller. Willard was found that he could add seven and half inches to his natural height of 5 feet 10 inches simply by stretching. He was also able to extend the length of his arms by 8 to 15 inches and make one leg 4 inches longer than the other.

In the September 1927 issue of the Science of Invention, the magazine set out to explain how Willard grew on demand. Editors took x-rays of his spine and determined that his spinal curvature is “perhaps greater than that of the average man.”

Most people with spinal curvatures remain that way unless there is some medical intervention, but Willard learned to straighten and relax his spine by his own muscle power. Read the story of The Man Who Grows at Amusing Planet. 

During the World War II Nazi occupation of France, there were many who were desperate to flee the country. Jewish people, exposed French Resistance members, and frankly, anyone who feared the Nazis wanted out. There were organized escape routes, but they were so secretive that many who worked for these networks did not know who else was involved, and they did not use their real names anyway. One of these escape schemes was run by a Dr. Eugène. The French Gestapo investigated, to the point of torturing potential escapees into exposing him, but Dr. Eugène managed to slip through their hands.

Throughout 1943, French Gestapo agents continued to assemble their dossier on this elusive Dr. Eugène. They learned that he had a surprisingly large network of agents combing Paris for Jews seeking extraction, and that the beauty parlor at 25 Rue des Mathurins was the network’s primary clearinghouse for escapees. Whenever an escapee-to-be arrived at the parlor, if the doctor decided he would furnish his services, he would instruct them to return at a specific time and date, prepared for departure. The escapee must have already concluded all of their affairs in France, including goodbyes to loved ones. They were to produce 10 passport-style photos for use in forged travel documents⁠—five portraits and five in profile. No more than two adults could travel together, and no more than two suitcases per person. Escapees were told to amass their cash and valuables, and hide them in their luggage and in their clothing. Part of the cash was for the network’s fee, the rest to pay for travel and to establish a new life. Importantly, escapees must leave behind all identifying documents so they would not be caught with conflicting names or initials. This included any monogrammed clothing or luggage.

As the war dragged on, the story takes quite a turn. Besides setting the stage, it's not even a World War II story. Read about the mysterious and elusive Dr. Eugène and his elaborate scheme at Damn Interesting. Beware that it is pretty gruesome. Also available in podcast form.

We think of flappers as the trend-setting women of the Roaring Twenties, but the style was introduced years earlier. Dancers Vernon and Irene Castle brought jazz music and the dances that go with it to America in 1912. America ate them up.

They popularised dances like the foxtrot, the waltz, the maxixe, the tango, and the bunny hug. They opened a dancing school across from Manhattan’s Ritz Hotel and their supper club, “Castles in the Air”, was located on a Broadway theatre’s roof. They also had a nightclub called “Castles by the Sea” on the Long Beach broadwalk and their own restaurant, the “Sans Souci”.

But the Castles, particularly Irene, did not just start trends on stage. She became a fashion trendsetter in every sense of the word, and came to be known as America’s Best Dressed Woman. What came after her was a fashion revolution – the perspective on style and dress changed completely.

Castle dressed in ways that made dancing easier- shorter skirts, no corset, and a stylish band to hold her hair. When she cut her hair short, suddenly young women all over wanted the "Castle bob." Read about Irene Castle and how her style influenced flapper culture at Messy Nessy Chic.