The culture of beekeeping in Slovenia is serious business, and neighborhood beekeepers have developed systems for making honey production easier, more efficient, and even beautiful. Most use a type of beehive known as the AŽ hive. This involves a particular design for each hive that allows them to be stacked together. The bees come and go from the front, and the beekeeper takes the honey from the back. Stacking those hives builds walls, which become a building, sort of a bee shed, which shelters the hives (and the keeper) from the weather and allows them to stay warm.

The particular Slovenian innovation that really draws our attention is the custom of painting the front of each hive. This began so that the bees will recognize their own hive among the dozens stacked together. We now know this is not necessary, but it has become tradition. These painted front panels, called panjske končnice, sport bold primary colors with folk art added. They are quite unique, and are often sold as souvenirs. Some are hundreds of years old. See more of these beehives and read their story at Atlas Obscura.

(Image credit: strudelt)

A new world record has been broken for the fastest time a person has traversed a greased pole. The record is now 3.04 seconds, set by Antonino Papa of Italy. Papa is a second-time record holder, since he bested everyone else in 2014 as well. Now, I'm sure that you want to see that, but even more, you want to see all the folks who didn't make it across, because that's much more entertaining. And that's what they show us first in this video. People fell off every which way, but you have to agree that it's better to fall off the pole than to fall on it. By the time we get to the guys who are actually good at this, we have some appreciation for the difficulty of the stunt. This is not something I'd ever want to try, but you had better believe I'll watch it any day. -via Boing Boing

An awful lot of us were introduced to the concept of American history in the lower grades, when we learned of the hero named Christopher Columbus, who "discovered" America. This was when our history began, regardless of the millions of people who already lived here, and had for thousands of years. Columbus wasn't the first European to visit the New World (that was the Norsemen) and he didn't set foot on the mainland (John Cabot did that in 1497). For a couple of hundred years after his voyages, he was rarely mentioned and little remembered. But by the time the 20th century rolled around, Columbus was not only a hero of American history, but a hero of science as well, for proving the world was not flat.

How did that happen? It was a deliberate move, almost like a public relations campaign, although it had no organized sponsors. It began during the American Revolution, when the colonists needed a hero to define their history, and it was most important that the hero had nothing to do with the British. Read how the cult of Columbus began, and came to define American history as it was taught in schools for hundreds of years, at Smithsonian.

Those are some gorgeous photographs, and better yet, they have dogs and cats in them! There were so many entrants in this year's International Pet Photographer of the Year competition that they decided to show us the top 100 of them in a video. The top photographer award was earned by Sanna Sander, whose images of good dogs in nature are breathtaking. But there are also top winners in the categories of Action, Creative, Documentary, Pets and People, and Portraits. You can see the winners and finalists in each category with a pulldown menu at the competition website. Or you can see a selection of the winners in a bigger format at My Modern Met. -via Fark

Ancient Egyptians preserved human corpses with a convoluted process that involved a variety of natural substances, including aromatic resins, beeswax, oils, and bitumen. When Europeans discovered this in the Middle Ages, it set off a fascination for all things Egyptian. That included owning a little piece of those preserved ancient bodies -as medicine. They told themselves it wasn't cannibalism, since the bodies were ancient, dried, made into powder, and had plenty of other ingredients. Or maybe they didn't think about it at all.

We can't blame people for wanting to be as well-preserved as those mummies, but they were already dead when it happened. How people came to believe mummies could be medicine was because of the word that eventually gave us the term "mummy." Mental Floss explains why the craze for ingesting mummies came about and how it played out during the Middle Ages, although that part is rather gross.

(Image credit: Zinnmann)

The bears of Katmai National Park in Alaska have been eating as much as they possibly can all summer, and now it's almost time to judge the results. For brown bears in Alaska, getting fat is an important accomplishment, because when winter comes and they go inside their dens to sleep, there won't be much food available. A good layer of fat will help them survive to emerge next spring, and for females, it's crucial to be healthy enough to support a pregnancy. Bears will eat almost anything, but the salmon in Brooks River helps them pack on hundreds of pounds.  

During Fat Bear Week, which begins Wednesday October 4th and runs through Tuesday the 20th, your voting will determine the winner in a series of tournament-style matchups. Which bear has gained the most weight? Which bear looks the fattest to you? It's kind of difficult to get them to come in and be weighed, so it's up to you and your observations.

A lot of people have been monitoring the bears at the park's webcams, and already have their favorites. During the live bracket reveal, park rangers explained how bears are selected for the tournament. First, they have to gain weight during the summer. Second, they tend to select bears who have overcome obstacles or otherwise have a good story. And third, the bears have to show up to get a picture taken so we can see their weight gain. Bears who stay hidden cannot compete. The first two matchups will be Wednesday, between two subadult bears named 806 Jr. and bear 428, and the familiar mother bear 402 vs. first-time mother 901. Fan favorites Chunk and Grazer are back, and three-time champion 480 Otis earned a bye. The "meet the bears" page has been updated, so you can read up on this year's contenders, and bookmark this page to place your vote each day for the tournament bracket matchups.    

It's October now, so of course you are looking for spooky films to watch. Here's one about a shape-shifting vampire, or a whole family of vampires, that are out to suck the life force from their victims. Well, they are amoebas, but if you were scaled down to their size, they would be terrifying. These microbes are voracious, and their feeding habits are so like the cinematically familiar "bite and suck" method that they were named Vampyrellida. Leave it to the folks at Journey to the Microcosmos to teach us about amoebas by making them the stars of a horror film. -via Geeks Are Sexy

Today I was introduced to small skeletons called larva convivialis through a TikTok video. These were used as party favors at fancy banquets in the Roman Empire, as a sort of memento mori, or a reminder of your eventual death. The memento mori of the Middle Ages were used in a religious sense, in that you'd better repent your sins and follow church practices because you never know when death is coming. It was a bit different in Rome. The reminder of death encouraged guests to enjoy themselves and their time left on earth as much as they could. Or when combined with other party decorations, they could scare the daylights out of guests for the host's perverse pleasure, as the emperor Domitian did in 89 CE.

The larva convivialis pictured at the top is at the Science Museum in the UK. Made of bronze, it's been altered a bit. The lower right leg was missing, so someone used its left arm as a substitute. Here is another example, from the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. It's a bit worse for wear.

Both artifacts have articulated joints (or did at one time), so the skeletons could be posed or made to dance by shaking them. And you can still buy them today, although the plastic version from Dollar Tree is much more affordable. -via Everlasting Blort

Have you ever been to a movie that made you tense up anticipating the evil force, and when it was finally revealed, you thought, "That's it?" You might have even laughed when you finally saw what was supposed to be so scary. We know from Jaws and many Alfred Hitchcock movies that the psychological suspense of a monster we can't see is deliciously scary, but often even the best special effects makeup, or even CGI, can't live up to our imaginations. A reddit post in r/movies asked filmgoers which movie monster was a real disappointment to see after building up a lot of tension. More than 3,000 comments came in discussing those films. Cracked picked out a list of the best, and gave them to us with illustrations. The picture above from the 1956 movie It Conqered the World may be an outlier in its sheer ridiculousness, but we can get a laugh out of it.

It Conquered the World. Paul Blaisdell specifically designed his monster to be seen partially in the shadows, but Roger Corman wasn't having it. He said "I paid for a monster and I'm damn well going to see a monster", so they rolled the giant evil cucumber out into the broad daylight of Bronson Canyon, painfully obvious it was on a little furniture cart.

The same redditor told us more about this alien from Venus. Read about 22 films that built up tension, and then revealed an underwhelming monster, at Cracked.

A crew aboard the EV (Exploration Vessel) Nautilus watches the camera feed from their ROV Atalanta and spots a dumbo octopus (Grimpoteuthis), shining ghostly white in the lights. There are quite a few species in this genus, named dumbo after the Disney elephant because of its fins that look like ears. Or who knows- maybe these are its ears that it uses for swimming, just like Dumbo used his oversized ears for flying. This footage was recorded 5,518 feet (1,682 meters) under the surface at the Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument near Hawaii.

These ROV videos are great because we get to see deep sea creatures in their own habitat, but also because we get the real-time reaction from the scientists watching from the ship. Their enthusiasm is contagious. One says, "I'm glad we got to see a live one!" That indicates they saw a dead one earlier. So why is it white? Octopuses have the ability to be any color they want, so this one may have turned white to match the bright light from the ROV. Or the light may have been so bright that it would show up white to us regardless of the real color. Or maybe it's combination of both. -via Born in Space

The earliest G.I. Joe action figures from the 1960s were a foot tall, in line with Barbie doll proportions. In 1982, the toy line was rebooted, and the action figures were rescaled to 3.75 inches tall. This allowed for more military vehicles and equipment to be made for them. They got jeeps and tanks and airplanes, but the biggest G.I. Joe playset came out in 1985- an aircraft carrier! The U.S.S Flagg Aircraft Carrier Playset was not exactly built to scale- if it were, it would have been 65 feet long. But it was still a massive toy, at seven and a half feet long, three feet wide and three feet tall. And you had to assemble it yourself. Or rather, parents did.

Every kid who knew about the U.S.S Flagg Aircraft Carrier Playset wanted one, but it cost over a hundred dollars, which was a lot to spend on a toy in 1985. Besides, it was a rare family that had room for one of these in their house. Those who actually purchased it got a lot for their bucks, including support vehicles, a PA system, and a captain. Read about this amazing playset that's now a collector's item at much higher prices at the Toy Collectors Guide. -via Nag on the Lake   

We all know the Acme Corporation. They were the ones who supplied Wile E. Coyote with all the gadgets and supplies he needed to catch the Road Runner. They didn't work all that well, but he could get them delivered out in the desert. Since those days, the name Acme has been used as a generic business name when you don't want to use a specific name. But wait, those Warner Brothers cartoons weren't the first to use Acme as a generic business name- they are just the most durable and universal media we have from 70+ years ago. Using Acme as a business name was already a Hollywood thing.

Even so, the name didn't spring up in Hollywood. It was a common real business name during the early 20th century, selected for a mundane but genius reason. While a few businesses that use the name Acme are still around, startups rarely select it because of its association with Wile E. Coyote and his many failures in using their products.

The city of San Francisco grew quickly and haphazardly starting with the California Gold Rush in 1848. Many thousands of residents were buried in the city's cemeteries, and over the years, they ran out of room. Besides, that valuable urban property was needed for other purposes. Burial in San Francisco was halted, and existing graves were dug up reburied elsewhere. Starting in 1930, they were sent to Colma for reburial, and the small town was established as the official burial site for San Franciscans.

But those reburials started as early as 1868, when thousands of graves were dug up from the Yerba Buena cemetery with a $10,000 appropriation from the city. That was not nearly enough money. When the funds ran out, the project was declared finished. The U.N. Plaza stands at the site today, above thousands of bodies still buried there. The same approach to moving graves went on in other cemeteries, which is why San Francisco now has a historical Chinese cemetery covered with a golf course and a Native American cemetery underneath a road and school. There are efforts to bring attention to and memorialize those forgotten graves that may never be recovered, which you can read about at Atlas Obscura.   

(Image credit: Library of Congress)

Cyriak Harris (previously at Neatorama) has been producing bizarre and surreal animations for almost twenty years now, although not as often as we'd like. Except for a commissioned music video, this is his first animated project he's shared in two years. Cyriak has a talent for turning everyday objects, often animals, into Eldrich horrors. The subject this time is a goose, which is a silly animal to begin with, but this one is a contortionist, as you would expect.

I noticed that this video comes with YouTube's fairly new transcript feature. What would it say besides "honk"? It doesn't even say that!

I will have to start checking out other videos' transcripts to see if they are as nonsensical.

Precursors to "The Girl With the Green Ribbon" featured necrophilia, adultery, demons, and (of course) the guillotine.https://t.co/VWkXDvnGTp

— Mental Floss (@mental_floss) September 25, 2023

A spooky story called "the girl with the green ribbon" is today known as a Millennial thing, since many young folks were introduced to it through the 1984 book In a Dark, Dark Room and Other Stories by Alvin Schwartz. But it's actually much older. I was first told the tale in the 1960s, when it was a girl with a black velvet ribbon around her neck. It was presented as a long and involved, but spooky, shaggy dog story with a short and sudden punch line, making everyone laugh. Later, my friends and I referenced the story quite a bit when black velvet chokers became the style.

How old is the story, really? Tracing back its history, it became quite popular after the French Revolution, in which many people were executed by the ever-so-efficient guillotine. But even that wasn't the beginning! Although older stories are a bit different, you can see how the story has evolved, modernized, and simplified over several hundred years. Oh, and if you haven't heard the story, you'll get several versions, including videos, in the article at Mental Floss.