The US has been battling invasive carp for almost 50 years, but they are thriving in the Mississippi River and other waterways. We've tried stopping them by wielding acoustic weapons, turning them into a food crop, and hunting them as a weird but challenging sport. Catching them is not hard; they just jump into the boat. But as carp multiply their way closer to the Great Lakes, where they could wreck the balance of native species, we've had to pull out the big guns.

The US Army Corps of Engineers built a series of "fences" by electrifying the water in canals leading to Chicago in order to stop the traveling carp from entering Lake Michigan. This electrified water is serious business, and canal traffic has to adhere to strict rules to keep people safe from being electrocuted. Tom Scott explains how it works.

In 1663, the partial fossilised skeleton of a woolly rhinoceros was discovered in Germany. This is the “Magdeburg Unicorn”, one of the worst fossil reconstructions in human history. pic.twitter.com/rmV1vcB3LY

— Brian Roemmele (@BrianRoemmele) August 14, 2022

This ridiculous picture can't help but make you laugh. It's as if someone played tinkertoys with a drawer of fossils. But that's exactly what happened. I had to look up the Magdeburg Unicorn, and lucky for me, Snopes has already done the research.

The fossils were unearthed at Seweckenberge, Germany, in 1663. Those who dug them up weren't particularly rigorous about documenting their depth or relative positions, or even with keeping the fossils from breaking. It was a long time ago. A few years later, Prussian scientist Otto von Geuricke constructed the beast that is now known as the Magdeburg Unicorn. The unicorn was later deconstructed, but we don't know when, and that's where things get complicated. Michael Bernhard Valentini drew a picture of the fossil construction dated 1704, but he did it from Geuricke's notes and descriptions instead of viewing the unicorn. Philosopher and scientist Gottfried Leibniz published a description of the unicorn in 1749, along with Valentini's drawing. But Leibniz's book that contained the description was published after his death, so no one could question him about it. There is speculation that Valentini's drawing, or some other drawing, may have come before Geuricke's fossil construction. In fact, some scientists question whether Geuricke was the one who put the bones together in the first place.

Today you can see the unicorn at the Museum für Naturkunde in Magdeburg, Germany. Scientists have identified three different animals that the bones once belonged to. -via Everlasting Blort

As the earth warms up, we have to think about our global food supply and the crops that feed nearly eight billion people. The world's crops are now dominated by wheat, corn, and rice. Large parts of the US grow nothing but one variety of corn year after year, depleting the land and causing erosion. Single species food is particularly vulnerable to climate change. If we can't quickly heal the land and stabilize global temperatures, what will we eat in the future? Yeah, you've heard about insects, but plant crops will be necessary to sustain human society.

Scientists are looking to the past, to crops that already flourish under harsh conditions, but never made it to the global table. Yet. Four of them are traditional crops that are candidates for diversifying our agriculture, plus there's a crop called Kernza that has been developed for the specific purpose of dealing with climate change. Kernza is a perennial wheat grass that doesn't require a farmer to buy seed, till the soil, or replant every year. Read about all five of these agricultural wonders at the Guardian.  -via Digg

(Image credit: Dehaan)

Ayer en San Telmo se perdió Juan Cruz y entonces pasó esto: pic.twitter.com/qIzsY9DHmn

— madrazzzo (@madrazzzo) August 21, 2022

It was a busy day yesterday at Plaza Dorrego in Buenos Aires, Argentina. A boy named Juan Cruz got separated from his father Eduardo. As is custom, the child was placed atop the tallest man around, and the crowd clapped in unison to draw attention. Then the band stepped in. They are singing, "Eduardo, come pick up Juan Cruz." It wasn't all that long before Eduardo showed up, but it may have seemed like a long time to Juan.

They do this in Brazil, too. According to the comments, this tactic among crowds is pretty standard across South America. -via reddit 

(Image credit: Richard Rogerson)

A historic house in England is a testament to the difficulty of living with no separation of church and state, even among the wealthy. In the 16th century, the British monarchs were Catholic, Protestant, Catholic, and Protestant again, and woe unto any subject who wouldn't change their religious practices accordingly. In 1578, during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, Humphrey Pakington inherited a fine manor home called Harvington Hall. In 1585, Catholic priests and Jesuits were banned from England on pain of death. Pakington, a devout Catholic, set about remodeling Harvington Hall accordingly with places for priests to hide during a raid.

In total, seven priest hides were placed within Harvington Hall. One, probably the earliest, is a small space below a floorboard in the chapel, which was located on the top floor of the house to allow the greatest amount of time to hide the instruments of Mass were people to arrive to search the house. This space was intended just to hide the objects related to Catholic Mass. However, the rest of the hides in the house were large enough to hold a person, and were intended to shield priests from hunters for days on end. Scattered across the house, they can be found above the bread oven, beneath a corridor, inside a staircase and in the roof.

(Image credit: Quodvultdeus)

The designs of these "priest hides" were ingenious. Some had two openings so that a priest could not only hide but also escape. They were disguised from detection by a confusing interior layout that put rooms at different levels on the same floor, as you can see from the back of the house. Harvington Hall is now in the possession of the Catholic church and is open to visitors. Read about the unique hiding spots in Harvington Hall at Just History Posts.  -via Strange Company
 

It's that timeof year! Cake Wrecks has a roundup of seven cakes decorated for back to school that contain typos, misspellings, and grammar errors. Someone said of the giant cookie above that it needs to be read like the Farmer's Insurance jingle: "We are teacher, bum ba-dum-dum bum bum bum!" I think it's supposed to say "We love our teacher." In the collection of seven cakes, we suspect one is misspelled on purpose, but there are other things about that cake that will furrow your brow. Having done this kind of work (and better than this), I must point out that professional cake decorators as a group are quite literate. However, when you pick out a ready-made cake at your local supermarket and request a message to be added at the last minute, the employee roped into doing it is not a professional cake decorator. See the rest of the back-to-school cakes at Cake Wrecks.

When Jill Tarter was a little girl, she was fascinated with the vastness of the universe and the stars and planets in it. She declared she was going to be an engineer when she grew up, in the days when people laughed at such ambitions in a little girl. Tarter was stubborn, and earned a bachelor's degree in engineering physics from Cornell, then a master's and PhD from Berkeley, where she got in on the ground floor in computer programming by neccesity. That skill helped her become involved in the search for extraterrestrial life. Tarter eventually worked for 35 years in the field, and worked her way up to director of the Center for SETI Research. In 1985, Carl Sagan wrote a novel named Contact in which the protagonist, Ellie Arroway, was based on Tarter. Here we meet the real Arroway as Tarter tells us a bit about her life and inspirations.   

On August 16, 1942, Lieutenant Ernest DeWitt Cody and Ensign Charles Ellis Adams took off from an island in San Francisco Bay in a US Navy blimp. Their mission was simple: surveillance of the West Coast for signs of Japanese submarines. Their ship, designated the L-8, was a Goodyear blimp repurposed for the war effort. Five hours later, the L-8 crashed into a street in Daly City. There was no fire and minimal damage to the blimp, but there was no one on board. A Navy investigation found multiple witnesses who saw the blimp through its journey that day, so they could retrace its steps, but the witnesses gave unreliable and contradictory testimony about the crew. No trace of Cody and Adams was ever found.

Plenty of theories about what happened to the men were proposed, some more outlandish than others, yet none were confirmed. The L-8 went on to serve the Navy through the rest of the war, but became known as the ghost blimp. Read about the mystery of the L-8 that still lingers 80 years later at Smithsonian. -via Strange Company

(Image credit: U.S. National Archives)

RiffTrax, the online successor to MST3K, skewered the 1989 movie The Return of Swamp Thing last night. You can see the original trailer to get a taste of how over-the-top that movie was. "He's got a grudge, 'cause they turned him to sludge!" Kevin Murphy and The RiffTones (featuring Brian Murphy) were so inspired by the love story between Swamp Thing and Heather Locklear that they wrote a little song about it. You'll find the full lyrics at Metafilter.

We know the term tutti frutti as a shortcut for a mixed fruit flavor for ice cream or lollipops, or a nonsense song from Little Richard. But in the 19th century, it was a recipe for preserving summer fruits of almost any kind in brandy. Before refrigeration, alcohol was one of the more dependable ways to make fruit last through the winter. Home cooks would begin making tutti frutti in the spring with strawberries, sugar, and brandy, and later add berries, peaches, cherries, pineapples, and whatever else was available as the crops rolled in. By the time the jar was full, the delicious fruit compote was ready for storage or eating. And it made those long winter days a bit more sunny.

Sadly, tutti frutti was made illegal during Prohibition, and by the time brandy was legal again, other fruit preservation methods were well established, and advances in transporting crops made fresh fruit available all year. But you can go back to the days of tutti frutti, because the history of tutti frutti is accompanied by a modern recipe for making your own at Atlas Obscura.

(Image credit: Ionutzmovie)

SolarProphet made a video for "Mr. Blue Sky" by the Electric Light Orchestra by feeding each line of the lyrics separately into the machine learning program Midjourney. You can tell that the algorithm is trying to create art with feeling, but not a coherent narrative. The simple song about a day with nice weather can sometimes shift into emotional melodrama as each line is interpreted as a possible book cover. Mr. Blue Sky himself is quite lovely, but Mr. Night is a rendering of our worst nightmares. When he's called just Mr. Blue, he could be anyone, but he's blue. -via Laughing Squid

The history of ketchup, or catsup, goes way back. The condiment was made with fermented fish, or mushrooms, or bananas, or whatever was locally available for cooks to turn into a sauce to liven up other foods. In America, the main ingredient was tomatoes. But early ketchup recipes called for fermented tomatoes to make the sauce last longer. After the Civil war, commercial food companies started mass-producing tomato ketchup. It was usually made from the parts of tomatoes that were left over after other products were made. Then the buying public started turning away from the flavor of fermented tomatoes, so companies began using new food preservatives to make ketchup shelf stable, particularly benzoates.

Dr. Harvey Wiley of the Department of Agriculture led a campaign against chemical preservatives in food, and particularly hated benzoates. He couldn't get them outlawed, but Wiley convinced Henry Heinz that they needed to go. Yes, that Heinz. Heinz worked diligently to come up with a recipe for ketchup that didn't require fermentation and didn't contain chemical preservatives. Read how he did it, and why tomato ketchup using his recipe became the only ketchup most of us know, at Atlas Obscura.

(Image credit: Mike Mozart)

Anyone who has cared for a family member with dementia knows how terrifying it can be, and how depressing nursing home care can be. Since the first dementia village, De Hogeweyk in the Netherlands, opened in 2009, the concept of designing a safe place to live that seems more like normal life than like a hospital has spread to other parts of Europe. Here we take a deep dive into how these villages are designed and operated. The video mentions that dementia villages are expensive, costing around $70K to $90K a year per resident. That may be expensive to a European, but it's no more expensive than the standard nursing home in America, and it feels more like a retirement community. The real question is, does this system work? Raw data is hard to come by, but then how can you measure comfort and happiness, and what is it worth? -via Digg

Ever since Europeans colonized Australia, that country has been fighting invasive species that threaten its unique ecosystem. Some of that was accidental, but other invasive species were deliberately introduced with disastrous results. The British imported the first prickly pear cactuses in 1788 to establish a plantation in New South Wales. The purpose of the cactus was to feed cochineal insects which produce a lucrative red dye, but that never happened. Cochineal insects didn't thrive in Australia. What happened was that prickly pears escaped the plantations and spread all over the desert and into farmland. By 1880, farmers were throwing their hands up because prickly pears had taken over their land, often growing 20 feet high. Chopping them up did no good, because each part of the cactus can root and regenerate. Trying to poison them only caused other problems.

It took until 1932 to get the prickly pears under control. But you might have guessed that the solution was to import a unique species of insect to kill it, which later caused problems when the scheme was tried in other countries. It's a story told again and again, like the woman who swallowed a fly. Read about the prickly pear invasion and the battle to defeat it at Amusing Planet.

(Image source: State Library of Queensland)

This video takes you through the history of the earth in just three minutes. We see the earth's formation, the evolution of species, and the rise of civilizations. It even jumps into the future! This is an art film, not an educational video. What's really notable is that the art was generated by artificial intelligence. The neural network program used was StableDiffusion, which was given 36 different prompts to generate the images. The thousands of images were then programmed to morph into each other. It's altogether trippy. If you look closely, you'll see a human being at about :58, and a couple more at :59, during the reign of the dinosaurs. Time travelers, or just a glitch? -via Geeks Are Sexy