If you've ever wondered how a courtroom stenographer keeps up with everything that is said in a trial, Isabelle Lumsden is happy to explain. It takes special equipment that require a particular technique. After watching the video, I am impressed, but I still don't know how she does it. -via Digg

In 1936, actress Mary Astor and her ex-husband Dr. Franklyn Thorpe went to court to fight over custody of their daughter Marylyn. It had been a particularly acrimonious divorce, and the custody battle became a sensation, mainly because of Astor’s diaries.  

Her estranged husband stole her private diaries, called the Purple or Lavender Diary, to use in a bitter custody battle. It was reported that Astor wrote breathless accounts of her many love affairs in its pages. As the press salivated for details, Astor appeared in court to face a hostile lawyer hellbent on proving she was an unfit mother. People flooded the courthouse and vendors sold hot dogs and ice cream to the crowds.

Astor's diary was the first major Hollywood sex scandal, "a sensation the likes of which had never been seen before," writes Joseph Egan in The Purple Diaries. Astor faced losing her career, daughter, and reputation, but she wouldn't be shamed. When faced with these challenges, Astor fought back.

Astor’s affairs became public knowledge during the trial, but so did Thorpe’s. The press couldn’t get hold of the actual diaries, so they published false excerpts. And the diaries weren’t even purple: they were written in brown ink in blue notebooks. In any case, the details of the case were both salacious and gripping, but the fallout what not what you would have expected from the early days of Hollywood. Read the story of the purple diaries at Mental Floss. -via Strange Company

(Image credit: CINELANDIA magazine)

It is with deep sorrow that Her Majesty The Queen has announced the death of her beloved husband, His Royal Highness The Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh.

His Royal Highness passed away peacefully this morning at Windsor Castle. pic.twitter.com/XOIDQqlFPn

— The Royal Family (@RoyalFamily) April 9, 2021

The British royal family has announced that Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, passed away this morning. Philip was 99, only two months from achieving his 100th birthday. His wife of 73 years, Queen Elizabeth II, has a habit of congratulating her subjects with a personal letter on their 100th birthday. In discussing the prince's death, reddit poet Poem_for_your_sprog said:

She looked at the message
she'd crafted and penned -
A letter to Philip
that she'd never send.

-via reddit

Neuralink, a tech startup owned by Elon Musk, is working on a wireless brain-machine interface to give paralyzed people some control over their environment. They've reached an important milestone in the quest.

Today we are pleased to reveal the Link’s capability to enable a macaque monkey, named Pager, to move a cursor on a computer screen with neural activity using a 1,024 electrode fully-implanted neural recording and data transmission device, termed the N1 Link. We have implanted the Link in the hand and arm areas of the motor cortex, a part of the brain that is involved in planning and executing movements. We placed Links bilaterally: one in the left motor cortex (which controls movements of the right side of the body) and another in the right motor cortex (which controls the left side of the body).

Pager was already pretty good at Pong, but now he can play without a joystick! Read more about the research at the company's website. -via Geekologie

There are few frontiers left in the world these days, but the vast oceans are enticing when you want to get away from it all. Some would like to get away from it all forever. These are the proponents of "seasteading," or living on the ocean, close to nature and away from laws, taxes, and mortgages.  

The first attempts at open-ocean habitation were obvious larks. In 1964, Ernest Hemingway’s brother, Leicester, declared that a bamboo raft, little bigger than an oversized parking space, was a sovereign nation, New Atlantis. One record shows that the “country,” which floated off the coast of Jamaica, had six founding citizens: Hemingway’s family plus a public relations specialist and his assistant. When the raft sank in a storm a few years later, no one seemed to be on board. In 1967, an engineer built a platform the size of a basketball court off the coast of Italy, added a restaurant and souvenir shack, and called it the Republic of Rose Island. The Italian government deemed it a tourist trap designed to evade the local tax laws and destroyed the structure the next year. (This story was the inspiration for Rose Island, a recent Netflix comedy.)

A retired British army major named Roy Bates proved more successful. In late 1966, he climbed aboard an old antiaircraft platform 11 kilometers off the coast of England, declaring it the Principality of Sealand and his family its royalty. Despite efforts by the British government to reclaim its property—and a few attempted coups by rivals—the Bates family still claims the platform, which supports a 10-room compound. As of 2019, its sole occupant was a full-time hired guard. Bates’s son, Michael, now the reigning monarch, lives in the more convenient country of England, where he runs a fishing fleet.

There are recurring problems in building an ocean utopia: international laws mean that a truly free community will have to be fairly far away from land, building a platform to live on is very expensive, and getting supplies will be difficult. Chad Elwartowski has been chasing the dream of living on the ocean with a community of like-minded individuals for years, which has involved spinning off corporations, becoming a fugitive from Thailand, and settling in Panama for now. Read his story, and more on the seasteading movement, at Hakai magazine. -via Damn Interesting

After their longest shutdown ever, Disneyland in California will open to the public (California residents only) on April 30. That will pave the way for the grand opening of their new theme park within the park, Avengers Campus, on June 4.

At Avengers Campus, guests of all ages can find their powers as they take an active role alongside some of their favorite Super Heroes, with a chance to live out their own heroic story. Whether that be slinging webs with Spider-Man, trying out inventive new foods, experiencing heroic encounters, and even teaming up with the Avengers and their allies, all recruits are invited to join in on the action.

“Avengers Campus will be a place where fans and guests can finally step into the universe they love, and stand alongside some of their favorite heroes,” said Dave Bushore, vice president of Franchise Creative & Marketing for Marvel Studios. “The optimism inherent in Avengers Campus captures the diversity, power and teamwork these extraordinary characters possess, and now they come together to unite people from all over the world under one guiding principle: We are stronger together.”

Get a rundown on what Avengers Campus will offer at Marvel. Reservations will be necessary, as the number of guests will be limited this summer. -via Mashable

Due to popular demand, many food manufacturers would like to offer their products with natural food coloring instead of synthetic colors. However, the pallete has so far been incomplete as there are no purely blue foods in nature. But a new ways to color foods blue has been found, strangely, in red cabbage.  

“Blue colors are really quite rare in nature – a lot of them are really reds and purples,” said Pamela Denish, a graduate student working with Professor Justin Siegel at the UC Davis Department of Chemistry and Innovation Institute for Food and Health.

Having the right blue color is also important for mixing other colors, such as green. If the blue isn’t right, it will produce muddy, brown colors when mixed, Siegel said.

Red cabbage extracts are widely used as a source of natural food colorings, especially reds and purples. These dyes are called anthocyanins. For about a decade, a team led by scientists at the Mars Advanced Research Institute and Mars Wrigley Science and Technology, in collaboration with the UC Davis Innovation Institute for Food and Health; The Ohio State University; Nagoya University, Japan; the University of Avignon, France; and SISSA University, Italy, have been working on isolating a blue anthocyanin from red cabbage. But the natural blue coloring is present only in tiny amounts.

The breakthrough came when researchers found an enzyme -among the billions available- that would turn the small amount of anthocyanin blue in red cabbage into a relatively large amount, making mass production possible. Read about the research at UC Davis. Just think, soon we'll be able to eat Superman ice cream and know that it's all natural! -via Real Clear Science

(Image credit: Amada44)

When you have kids and can't go places, you need to get creative about having fun at home. Steve Wilkins and his sons Tyler and Dylan harnessed the family treadmill for some auto racing. They tilted the back end of the treadmill and loaded it up with 100 Hot Wheels cars! Switch on the treadmill, and watch what happens. Wilkins provides the exciting play-by-play narration as we find out which car will survive the longest. They've recorded a whole series of these races. -via Laughing Squid

Kalimullah Khan was inspired by a crossbred rose bush. https://t.co/p13MXaX5Pb

— Atlas Obscura (@atlasobscura) April 7, 2021

Kalimullah Khan grew up on his family's mango farm in Malihabad, in northern India. When he was 15, a rose bush inspired him to learn the art of grafting, and of course that would involve mango trees. His first grafted tree was destroyed by floods, but he never gave up. Now 80 years old, Khan is proud to show off his magnum opus.   

Over the years, Khan fine-tuned the art of cutting off a branch from one tree, slicing notched angles into it, and then attaching the orphaned cutting to a new, hybrid tree. In 1987, he started grafting cuttings of different varieties onto a 100-year-old mango tree. He collected samples from across the country to add, seeking out rare varieties. Khan says the tree now grows more than 300 types of mangoes. He calls it Al Muquaraar, or The Resolute.

The tree has become a tourist attraction, and Khan will let visitors sample the fruit. He also cultivates new varieties of mangos. Read his story at Atlas Obscura.

You've read about Miniatur Wunderland, the place in Hamburg with the world's largest model railway. Recently, they set up a train to cruise by 2,840 water glasses, playing classical tunes as it passes by. The trip lasted six minutes, and set a world record! The rest of the video is a look at how they did it. -via Digg

Once upon a time, we had to find the majority of a skeleton to figure out what ancient people were like. Now we can isolate the genes in a small bone fragment or tooth and find out all kinds of things about them. Two studies have just been published about the genes of the oldest modern humans yet found in Europe, those of three people in Bulgaria and another in Czechia, all who lived about 45,000 years ago.  

“Interestingly, these earliest Europeans that we find in the Bacho Kiro Cave did not contribute substantially to later West Eurasians,” says Mateja Hajdinjak, of the Francis Crick Institute (London), co-author of the study published this week in Nature. “These groups got largely replaced in Western Eurasia by subsequent migrations of people. But they are closely related to the human groups that gave rise to later East Eurasians and Americans—including present-day populations.”

“It’s just really cool that fossils of three individuals in Bulgaria left behind DNA, and can trace their descendants to different parts of the world than we’d expect, in ancient and living East Asians and Native peoples of the Americas,” adds Rick Potts, director of the Smithsonian’s Human Origins Program, who wasn’t involved in the genetic research.

The genome study also shows that a thick branch on the Bacho Kiro humans’ family tree belongs to the Neanderthals. The individuals carry 3 to 3.8 percent Neanderthal DNA in their genes, which suggests more than a one-off mating far back in their family history. In fact, the genomes show that these European humans had Neanderthal ancestors just six or fewer generations back.

The skull from Czechia also has a substantial amount of Neanderthal DNA. Read more about the findings at Smithsonian.

(Image credit: Tsenka Tsanova, MPI-EVA Leipzig)

Guldies Konst (previously at Neatorama) made a cute claymation video of a doughboy-type character lifting weights. It doesn't go as planned. The sequence is only 11 seconds long, but then we get a look at how the sound effects for it were created, which is a treat. -via Laughing Squid

DeMoulin Brothers & Co. of Greenville, Illinois, has been in business since 1892. They manufactured military uniforms for both world wars, and today they sell band uniforms. Early in the company's history, they also sold novelties, such as devices for pranks and illusions. These items were designed for and aimed at lodges and fraternities for hazing purposes. All in good fun, of course.

Clothes steeped in cultural meaning as party costumes; imitation guns to terrorise; a goat – wait for the goat; a guillotine; the rhythmic automatic spanking machine; the embarrassingly erotic ‘pillow fight’; the promise of having your facial bones crushed by a large lead weight; the ‘branding and whirling table’; the intimately ravaging ‘pointed affair’; more buttock thrashing with the ‘spanking shovel’; and many more japes to get excited lodge members howling as ‘the candidate’ fears for their life all feature in the DeMoulin Brothers & Company’s cornucopia of earthly delights.

The guillotine pictured above was built to stop a few inches from the victim's head. Surely nothing could ever go wrong with that! While most of the items pictured in the DeMoulin Brothers & Co. 1908 catalog were illusions, some delivered an electric shock to the unsuspecting victim. Take a look at the weird items they had to offer back in the day at Flashbak. -Thanks, WTM!

Even in a pandemic year, the high school hockey players of Minnesota grow their hair in an attempt to make the Minnesota State High School All Hockey Hair Team. This is the 12th annual team. YouTuber Game On! Minnesota goes with the flow and gives us the rundown of the hair situation this season. Hair that was cut, or rather, styled at home ruled this year. Facial hair was rarely seen due to masks. As always, the hair competition supports the Hendrickson Foundation, which runs Special, Sled, Blind, and Military hockey programs. -via Metafilter  

See the All Hockey Hair Teams from previous years.

The Hoosac Tunnel in western Massachusetts is a 4.75-mile railroad tunnel running under the Hoosac Mountain Range, built to connect Boston with the Erie Canal. Digging this tunnel was not an easy project. It began in 1851 and was supposed to have been completed in three years and cost little more than a million dollars. Instead, it took 24 years and $20 million, and 192 men lost their lives building it.

As noted above, the tunnel’s completion took a horrendous death toll.  Men fell down the tunnel’s thousand-foot deep center shaft.  Men were burned alive.  Men were blown to bits by nitroglycerine explosions.  A not-untypical disaster involved three workers, Ned Brinkman, Billy Nash, and Ringo Kelley.  Kelley accidentally set off some explosives, burying the other two men alive.  Instead of running for help, Kelley fled the scene, leaving his coworkers to their fate.  One year later, Kelley’s dead body was found in the tunnel, at the same spot where Brinkman and Nash had died.  It was widely believed that the ghosts of his victims had gotten their revenge.  In 1868, three years after this triple tragedy, a mechanical engineer named Paul Travers wrote to his sister:

“Last night Mr. Dunn and I entered the great tunnel (unfinished) at 9 p.m.  We traveled about two miles into the shaft and then stopped to listen.  As we stood there in the cold silence, we both heard what truly sounded like a man groaning out in pain.  As you know, I have heard that sound many times during the war.  Yet when we turned the wicks up on our lamps, there were no other human beings in the shaft.  I haven’t been this frightened since Shiloh.  Mr. Dunn agreed that it wasn’t the wind we heard.  Perhaps Nash or Brinkman?  I wonder.”

Scary stories piled up around the tunnel, from the voice that kept laughing as a tree fell on workers, to a blue headless ghost, to a man who walked in and was never seen again, to the woman who scoffed at a tunnel superstition -right before she died. Read a sampling of why the Hoosac Tunnel is considered one of the most haunted tunnels in the world at Strange Company.

(Image credit: Doug Kerr)