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.

Graphic designer John Pasche was making a name for himself for his art deco concert posters in 1970, when The Rolling Stones contacted him about doing one for their 1970 European tour. They went back to him for some album art, and that's when the famous logo that became known as Hot Lips was born.

The iconic logo was first seen inside the Stones' 1971 album Sticky Fingers. I remember it well- I went to the local record store, and every copy they had already had the shrink wrap torn because everyone wanted to play with the zipper in the front.

Great Big Story talked with Pasche about his experience in making the logo that became recognizable all over the world. The starting point was the tongue, and the lips came afterward. And they are not Mick Jagger's lips. More than 50 years later, Pasche still gets a kick out of seeing those lips in the wild. -via Laughing Squid

It's never a good idea to date your gynecologist. But plenty of women did when it came to renowned Parisian doctor Samuel Pozzi. He developed new surgical techniques and instruments that are still used today. Pozzi hung around with the movers and shakers of the day, including Marcel Proust and Oscar Wilde, and had affairs with his patients, from actresses to princesses. It's no wonder he earned the nickname "the Love Doctor."

In his view of women, Pozzi was progressive in some ways. He advocated putting a patient at ease, and getting consent before touching, which was rarely done at the time. Pozzi also worked to improve medical practices, such as hand washing and providing a clean environment for surgery. In other ways, he was as sexist as most men of his time. He had no qualms about mixing his patients and his lovers. Pozzi discouraged his own daughter from pursuing a career in medicine, believing it would lead to more woman wanting careers, and we can't have that. He left his legacy not only in gynecology, but also in a famous portrait painted of him. Read about the uniquely alluring Dr. Samuel Pozzi at Messy Nessy Chic.

Some years ago, we gave you seven reasons not to climb Mt. Everest, but people still do it. It's a cool story to tell your friends, but reason #5 is that there's a good chance you will die up there. There are many ways that the climb might kill you- it's not just the cold and the lack of oxygen, although those are big and may lead to other problems.

Dr. Emily Johnson is a physician and a mountain climber. She's been to the peak of Mount Everest three times, and knows how dangerous it is. In this video, she enumerates the different ways you could lose your life climbing the world's tallest mountain. Dr. Johnson tells us that Everest is not the most dangerous mountain peak. Both Annapurna and K2 are tougher, but way more people die on Everest because way more people climb it, and many of those people are oblivious to the dangers and aren't as well prepared as they should be. Just because a lot of people have been to the peak of Everest doesn't guarantee that you'll make it back. -via Digg 

These days, there are roughly 200 Renaissance fairs and festivals held in the US every year. They serve as a glorious opportunity for cosplayers and historical re-enactors, as well as artists, craftspeople, actors, dancers, teachers, and historians. Even if you're just a spectator, they can be a lot of fun. The very first Ren fair was held in Southern California in 1963, the brainchild of Phyllis Patterson, who taught history, speech, dance, and drama until 1960. Sometimes she explained that she left teaching to become a stay-at-home mother, while other times she declared she didn't want to sign California's loyalty pledge that had been enacted in the wake of Joseph McCarthy's Red Scare campaign. Patterson made friends with many creative types, actors, writers, etc. who were out of work because they were blacklisted for being suspected of communist leanings. And when creative people have time on their hands, you get ideas like a Renaissance fair.

The first fair was so popular, they did it again year after year, growing exponentially. During the Summer of Love in 1967, the fair became associated with the counterculture and drug-using hippies, and local resistance made getting permits difficult. But despite those battles, Patterson's fairs grew and multiplied, and became more popular than ever. Read the story of the first Renaisance fair and those that followed at Smithsonian.

(Image credit: R'lyeh Imaging)