In 79 AD, Mount Vesuvius in Italy erupted, burying the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum. In the 1980s, 300 skeletons were excavated from the ash, rock, and lava. They were identified as soldiers, and later placed on exhibit. In 2017, new research began that has now determined that one of the soldiers was a high-ranking Roman officer who was sent to Herculaneum to help rescue the victims of the eruption.

The rescue mission to Herculaneum and Pompeii is one of the most well-documented events of the period. It was led by Pliny the Elder, a historian and Roman naval officer who also died in the mission, and described by witness accounts collected in notes left by his nephew, Pliny the Younger.

A letter from Pliny the Younger to the historian Tacitus described the scene: "The ash already falling became hotter and thicker as the ships approached the coast and it was soon superseded by pumice and blackened burnt stones shattered by the fire.

"Suddenly the sea shallowed where the shore was obstructed and choked by debris from the mountain."

So how did archaeologists come to the conclusion that this one officer was there to rescue Herculaneum? The clues that led to the identification are explained at NBC.  -via Strange Company

Iggy Pop pulls up the song "Tweet Tweet Tweet" by Sleaford Mods. Who is better equipped than his parrot to render an opinion on it? -via reddit

As soon as the Magic Lantern was invented somewhere around 1650, Jesuit priest Athanasius Kircher appropriated it to project skeletons and scare people into going to church. Sure, the image projector was a scientific breakthrough, but it soon became apparent that its real future lay in entertainment. One of the earliest and most successful showmen to popularize the Magic Lantern was Étienne-Gaspard Robertson, a gifted physicist who was seriously interested in summoning the devil. He developed quite a few methods for making a Magic Lantern presentation into a horrifying, adrenaline-fueled spectacle.  

The show was about an hour and a half, and it was made up of several scenes introduced by Robertson on the themes of love, death, and resurrection, incorporating ancient gods and figures from history and mythology. Between the ghosts and dancing demons, the story of Eros and Psyche was told; Isis and other mystery goddesses were honored; and Hades and Persephone presided over everything. The Graces were summoned only to degrade into skeletons before the startled audience, and a woman representing love and death was a common feature, appearing throughout to tease the audience until she was killed by the Fates, only to be resurrected with rose petals near the end.

This was no ordinary slideshow—Robertson’s innovation and mastery of the Magic Lantern produced effects difficult to imagine even now. The scenes he created were elaborate, detailed, and animated; between the speed of the changing slides, variable depth, and visual effects, Robertson had all but created early 3D cinema. Multiple devices hidden by screens projected monsters and ghouls onto walls, smoke, and special lengths of canvas and gauze treated with wax for translucence. Ventriloquists and sound effects brought them to life in ways people had never before experienced. The ghosts appeared so real, audience members tried to fight them.

Read about Robertson's horror theater that enthralled audiences a hundred years before motion pictures at Dirty Sexy History. -via Strange Company

Redditor frekkenstein did his part to motivate his sister to put in extra effort in college.

I told my sister if she graduated with honors I would wear a matching dress to her graduation. She said the thought of seeing me in a dress was her motivation when she wanted to quit. Worth it to me.

Do you think he might have made that challenge assuming that commencement would be virtual? In any case, she selected a nice dress and he had some trouble determining what size to order. Join the club. He was also annoyed by the lack of pockets. Join the club. The commencement ceremony was at the new Texas Rangers stadium in Arlington, where the sun shone brightly on the graduates. While women know to sunscreen our necklines and shoulders, no one told frekkenstein, as you can see. A good time was had by all.  

You may have thought that parachutes are for people to escape from planes, but apparently we now have parachutes for the whole plane. Two small airplanes approached Centennial Airport near Denver for landing on Wednesday but collided before they touched down. A Cirrus SR22 single-engine plane deployed its Cirrus Airframe Parachute System, which you see above. The pilot and his one passenger walked away from the incident. The second plane was a twin-engine Fairchild Metroliner, which suffered extensive damage.

The first plane was carrying two people at the time of the crash and both walked away without injury. The second plane landed safely at an airport. The only person on board was the pilot, who wasn't injured either. https://t.co/KDpz4ZvEqx

— WDTN (@WDTN) May 12, 2021

Still, the pilot, who was the only person aboard the green plane, walked away uninjured!  -via Boing Boing

Over the past few years, highly publicized lawsuits have stirred skepticism among advocates and family members of those who have been declared brain dead. Some reject brain death on religious grounds, while others hold out hope for recovery. https://t.co/SIPMh8hB8F

— Undark Magazine (@undarkmag) May 13, 2021

Once upon a time, when a person's brain, lungs, or heart stopped working, they died, because all the other body functions depend on each of those three. But in the 20th century, we developed machines to work for the lungs, and then more advanced machines to keep blood circulating when a heart stops. That only leaves the brain, and so we developed the concept of brain death. The problem with brain death is that it may be interpreted differently by doctors, scientists, family members, religions, and states, where the definition of legal death is very important.  

There was no consistency among the states, however, and by the late 1970s, policymakers recognized that the nation needed a uniform definition of death. In 1981, a presidential commission proposed the Uniform Determination of Death Act, which says a person is considered legally dead when their breathing and circulation have irreversibly stopped or when their entire brain has irreversibly stopped functioning.

The Uniform Determination of Death Act is not a federal law but rather a model statute recommended for each state to adopt. Today, every state recognizes brain death, yet the issue is far from settled. For one thing, only about two-thirds of states adopted the complete language of the act. Beyond that, state-level court decisions and legislation have created a patchwork of rules, so that brain-death examinations are handled differently in different states. The result is that the fundamental concept of death depends upon where a person is located. Some states allow family members to opt out of having a brain-death examination performed on a loved one, regardless of the person’s neurological status. Moreover, in New Jersey — but only New Jersey — a person who has been determined to be brain dead cannot be declared legally dead without the family’s consent.

“The line between life and death needs to be bright and clear and sharp, and unfortunately, it’s now a little bit gray and a little bit fuzzy,” Pope said. “We need, as some might say, to build a wall between life and death.”

Finding the right spot to build that wall is difficult. For any definition of brain death, there are edge cases that push the boundaries of the guidelines in use. Read about the history and science of defining brain death at Undark. -via Damn Interesting

Kiki, a gorilla at the Franklin Park Zoo in Boston, saw Emmeline Austin through the glass and was drawn to her five-week-old son Canyon. You might guess that Kiki is a new mother, too, and you'd be right. It's a shame that Kiki and her son Pablo are living behind glass, but conditions in the wild aren't all that great for gorillas these days, either. -via Boing Boing

Clara Loeper was born partially paralyzed, and died in 1883 at the age of 21. Dr. Rudolph of the Eclectic Medical College approached her mother about donating Clara's body to the school for study even before she died. He was refused, more than once, and Clara was buried in Mountain View Cemetery in Oakland, California.

At Clara’s April 5 burial, her mother felt unsettled and shared suspicions that Dr. Rudolph might try something uncouth, so someone slipped a piece of wire into the mound of dirt covering the grave. On the 6th, Mrs. Loeper returned “and perceived at once that the grave had been violated,” the Oakland Tribune reported in 1883. Dirt was scattered, and the wire was nowhere to be seen. Mrs. Loeper alerted the cemetery superintendent, who started digging and confirmed the wretched truth: The coffin lid had been axed open, and Clara was missing.

She had been taken away nude. “Clothes were rudely torn off and thrown pell-mell into the grave. Even the stockings were pulled off,” noted the Tribune article. It’s hard to say why the thieves left Clara’s garments behind; maybe they thought the clothes would be easy identifiers, or perhaps they were concerned about adding property theft onto the crime of body theft. Grave-robbing was a felony in California, and a conviction could lead to a five-year prison sentence.

The investigation that followed involved both police and private investigators, and the scandal exposed Eclectic Medical College's unsavory methods of obtaining cadavers for study. Read the story of Clara Loeper's restless corpse at Atlas Obscura. 

There's lots of work to be done at Sunshine Animal Refuge Agadir in Morocco, but everyone needs a break now and again. One commenter asked "Is this heaven?" and Recomemedur (the uploader) replied, "Damn near." -via Nag on the Lake

A common theme of apocalyptic movies is a small set of survivors trying to build thriving communities after a worldwide disaster. But how small could that number of survivors really be in order to repopulate the earth? Scientists, as well as scriptwriters, have been studying the issue.

The short answer is, it depends. Different catastrophes would create different doomsday conditions for surviving human populations to endure. For example, a nuclear war could trigger a nuclear winter, with survivors facing freezing summer temperatures and global famine, not to mention radiation exposure. However, putting some of these conditions aside and focusing on population size, the minimum number is likely very small compared with the approximately 7.8 billion people alive today.

"With populations in the low hundreds, you can probably survive for many centuries. And many small populations of that kind have survived for centuries and perhaps millennia," Cameron Smith, an adjunct assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at Portland State University in Oregon, told Live Science.

An article at LiveScience looks at the numbers, by looking to the past and how small populations worked in prehistory, and by looking to the future when people may travel to other planets. -via Damn Interesting

Brian David Gilbert and Karen Han like to watch birds, and they've wrote a nice little song about it. How wholesome! If you think that's all this is, you are in for a shock. From Gilbert's Tweet introducing it:

we like watching birds!
enjoy our normal video about the normal birds that we like watching (normally)!

 -via Laughing Squid

Are you considering a road trip to celebrate your vaccine status and re-enter the world of travel? Star Wars fans now have a valid argument for visiting the Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, Virginia, which is an extension of the Smithsonian Institution. The Smithsonian has acquired Luke Skywalker's X-Wing fighter!

The famous but fictional spacecraft of the blockbuster Star Wars film franchise is on long-term loan to the Smithsonian from Lucasfilm Ltd. Fans can now watch while the X-Wing undergoes conservation at the Restoration Hangar alongside World War II aircraft and other historic airplanes and space vehicles. Late next year, the famed film prop will go on display outside the Albert Einstein Planetarium at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum on the National Mall in Washington, D.C.

“We are thrilled to have an X-Wing on exhibit,” says Margaret Weitekamp, space history chair at the museum. “It is a real screen-used vehicle from the 2019 film Rise of Skywalker. This display speaks to that crossover connection between people who are excited about space flight and have been inspired by the visions Star Wars has been putting out since 1977.”

Read about this particular model of X-Wing and what the Smithsonian is doing with it at Smithsonian magazine.

(Image credit: Jim Preston, NASM)

This remix by the YouTuber known as There I Ruined It (previously) combined Sir Mix-A-Lot with Leonard Bernstein to produce this mess. It's not the first time that "Baby Got Back" has been given the classical treatment, far from it, but the world has room for one more such project. -via reddit

Cat owners know that they are the perfect pet, except for climbing the curtains, skewing the upholstery, waking you up early, and knocking everything into the floor from any elevated surface they can reach. Why do they do that? Are they jealous of any possessions their human might like? Are they doing it to piss us off? Or is it to exert dominance over their environment? The answer is simpler than any of that.

It shouldn’t surprise you to learn that cats knock stuff over because it’s fun. That’s it—that’s the whole explanation. If you want to stop it, you need to know why this particular hobby is so enjoyable so you can give your cats better, less destructive outlets for that energy.

An article at Lifehacker goes on to explain in detail why cats find it fun to knock your stuff to the floor, and more importantly, what you can do to stop this madness.  -Thanks, WTM!

Believe it or not, the song "Stairway to Heaven" is 50 years old. Led Zeppelin first played it in public in March of 1971, and the recording was released on their fourth album in November of that year. The song quickly became a prog-rock favorite but eventually was overplayed. As it was discovered by succeeding generations, that cycle continued over and over again for 50 years -so far. You could say that "Stairway" has everything -a ballad at one end and a rocking climax at the other, the hipness of a permanent album cut, a killer guitar solo, and lyrics that were just confusing enough to act as a Rorschach test: everyone interpreted them in their own way.

What if the lyrics to “Stairway” are so strange and convoluted because they’re actually meant to be played backwards? That was the theory of televangelist Paul Crouch, who decided in 1982 that the verse beginning around 4:19 (“If there’s a bustle …") offers a satanic message when played in reverse. This, according to Crouch, is the hidden message: “Here’s to my sweet Satan/The one whose little path would make me sad, whose power is Satan/He will give those with him 666/There was a little tool shed where he made us suffer, sad Satan.” In the book Hammer of the Gods, one of Zeppelin’s recording engineers offers this rebuttal: “Why would they want to spend so much studio time doing something so dumb?”

That's just one of 11 facts about "Stairway to Heaven" that you can read at Mental Floss. The last one makes it all worthwhile.