Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe (previously at Neatorama) catalogued more than a thousand stars before the telescope was invented. For his service, King Frederick II of Denmark gave him an island to use for his studies. There, Brahe had an observatory built, which he called Uraniborg. It may seem strange to have an astronomical observatory with no telescope, but he had other instruments, and a stable spot to observe the heavens was a boon to his studies. Uraniborg was a walled haven with a strictly laid out geometrical design. It had observation points, towers, a fruit orchard, and an herb garden. It also had a three-story house with living quarters on the ground floor, and a second floor for Brahe's 16th-century astronomical instruments: astrolabe, quadrant, sextant, and armillary sphere. The third floor was for students. Oh yeah, there was an alchemy lab in the basement. Science was going through some changes.  

A change in the monarchy left Brahe without the funds to run Uraniborg, and it was abandoned, then destroyed after Brahe's death. But archaeological excavations in the 1950s unearthed enough of the original foundation that it has been partially restored and recreated. Read about the observatory without a telescope at Amusing Planet. 

Roundabouts, sometimes called traffic circles, are safer, more efficient, and environmentally-friendly than intersections with stop signs or stoplights. They are everywhere in the UK, so much that there's a club for them. In this video we get to hear from their delightful leader, who goes by the title the Lord of the Rings. But the US has been slow in adopting roundabouts for several reasons. Many drivers don't understand them at all, like the people who suddenly had to deal with one in Kentucky a couple of years ago. This video will not help you in that area, as they switch back and forth between British and American roundabouts, with people driving the "wrong" way in one or the other.

But the US is slowly installing more and more of them. I hope road designers will learn from their mistakes. There is an interstate exit in my area that has low visibility and fast traffic on the cross highway. The reason for the low visibility is that the ramps had to be carved into rocky hills, and there wasn't enough carved away. So they installed roundabouts, but still didn't carve more of the rock away. Therefore, even though the signage is good and people know how to use a roundabout, the circles are way too small, visibility is still low, and those intersections are now effectively four-way stops. There are some kinks to be worked out before US traffic flows through roundabouts from sea to shining sea. -via Laughing Squid

Although the dates are not strictly documented, it is believed that Leonardo da Vinci worked on painting the Mona Lisa for years. We can do better than that, now that we have computer paint programs! And like anything else, we can make a competition out of it. Matt Round brings us the game Clone-a Lisa, in which you have 60 seconds to recreate Da Vinci's Renaissance portrait. When your time is up, you will be given an automatically-generated percentage score. Apparently filling the frame with color goes a long way. Those who painted the background first tend to score higher than those who drew a face and then ran out of time (like me). I should have read the Mastodon thread on how the game was created. That might have given me a heads up before I dived in. Members of Metafilter were kind enough to share their attempts.

Mine, with a very low score somewhere in the 20% range, is at the bottom right. I lost track of time. Sixty seconds goes by fast! I'm sure I can improve upon that if I tried it more than once. You will do better.

The World Yo-Yo Contest 2023 took place over the weekend in Osaka, Japan. Hajime Sakauchi won the 2A division with this amazing performance. I would have ended up with two yo-yos bound for the trash, hopelessly tangled, and that would have been after the first few seconds. If this is the winning performance in the 2A, what did the other divisions do? It turns out that the divisions are all different styles of yo-yo performance. 

There’s different classifications of yo-yo trick routines. 1A is your standard yo-yo trick. One yo-yo, the string is tied to both finger and yo-yo.

In 2A, you get two yo-yos, one for each hand, independently doing tricks at the same time. 3A is two yo-yos, but the two yo-yos interact. In 4A, the string is attached to the finger, but not to the yo-yo. The player attaches and detaches the yo-yo several times during the routine, and just does amazing things with the string.   

Continue reading to see the champions of each division.

At just about the time my two daughters were outgrowing their Disney princess obsession (and their homemade costumes), the Disney Princess group was born. Andy Mooney took over as the head of Disney's consumer products division, and saw the value in building a new franchise with all the Disney princesses from the classic animated films together. Strangely, the company had tried to keep them separate previously for both artistic and economic reasons that seem to make no sense now. Mooney's idea took off, and the Disney Princesses were a juggernaut. The group not only encouraged a rewatch of the older movies, but also boosted the profiles of the newer princesses, like Moana and Rapunzel, as they joined the gang. And they sold a lot of Disney merchandise.

The original group of Princesses were Snow White, Cinderella, Aurora, Ariel, Belle, Jasmine, Pocahontas, and Mulan. The inclusion of Mulan indicated that a character didn't have to be even a fictional princess to be a Princess. Tinkerbell (from Peter Pan) and Esmerelda (from The Hunchback of Notre Dame) were later added, then were quietly removed. Elsa and Anna from the 2013 hit Frozen were never invited to the group, even though they were royalty. There are now 13 Disney Princesses, from different countries, different time periods, and even different animation styles. But what about Tinkerbell, Esmerelda, Elsa, and Anna? Find out why some princesses are not Disney Princesses at Mental Floss.

A long barrow is a Neolithic underground chamber, found in many places across Europe. Not all were dug out from the ground, as it was easier to build the chamber, then heap earth over the top, creating a mound. It was even easier if you started with a depression in the ground or a hill. But what were they for? The newest Neolithic long barrows are thousands of years old, and were possibly used for different purposes in different eras, but were often used as tombs. We don't know for sure if that's what they were originally designed for.

These prehistoric chambers are not exactly safe for the general public to explore, so Tom Scott visited Soulton Long Barrow, which was built over the last ten years with modern safety standards in mind -and lighting. This barrow is part of the Soulton Hall estate in Shropshire, where you can stage a wedding or book a vacation.

The world's longest ultramarathon will begin on August 30 in Jamaica, Queens, New York. It will also end in Jamaica, Queens, New York. It's the annual Sri Chinmoy Self-Transcendence 3100 Mile Race, which will take place every day beginning at 6AM until midnight, for 52 days. The goal is to complete 3100 miles in that time, so each runner needs to complete almost 60 miles each day to stay on track. The distance coupled with insufficient sleep (for those who need the entire 18 hours each day) will be exacerbated by the monotony, as the route is barely over a half-mile long, and must be run over and over and over again.

It takes a special kind of runner to participate in such a grueling event, but plenty of people have done it. This year's runners are nine men and five women, all accomplished ultramarathon runners, most of whom have run this race before, some many times.  

The annual race was founded by Sri Chinmoy, a spiritual leader and athlete who promoted self-transcendence through meditation and peace through athletic competition. The race itself was founded in 1985, and expanded to 3100 miles in 1997. You will be able to follow the progress of the runners each day through the race website. -via Nag on the Lake

(Image credit: John Gillespie)

I don't recall when it happened, but when I heard that young people were drinking a lot of Jägermeister, I thought it might be because the green bottle and the spicy medicinal taste came across as an available substitute for absinthe. Silly me, those young people didn't know what absinthe was. Maybe it's the taste of cough syrup that makes one feel like one is drinking something illicit, especially when cut with ultra-caffeinated Red Bull. But Jägermeister has been around a long time. Long before it was available in the US, German people were using the liqueur as a digestif, which led to using it as cure-all. After all, if it taste like medicine, it might work as medicine. It might surprise you to learn that Jägermeister is a direct descendant of vinegar, although through business, not chemistry. Weird History Food takes us through the story of how Jägermeister was developed, marketed, and imported.

We saw in the latest Slow Mo Guys video how tattoo guns do not inject ink, but rather create holes in the skin that the ink automatically fills by capillary action. That same technique is a way to diagnose scabies. Scabies is a skin parasite that burrows under the top layer of skin and causes severe itching and overall misery.

The New England Journal of Medicine published a case study in which a man who had been itching for months was diagnosed by putting a "purple skin marker" (which sounds like something that we would call a Sharpie) on an itchy patch and then wiping the ink off with alcohol. The ink remained in a burrow under the skin, indicating that scabies had tunneled through. It's not the most pleasant way to get a tattoo, but the man was diagnosed and was able to get proper treatment for the skin mite. -via TYWKIWDBI

The Sally Lightfoot crab (Graspus graspus) is rumored to have been named after a Caribbean dancer, because they are agile and fast. They can only eat during low tide, when seaweed is exposed on the rocks offshore. That means every day they need to travel out to those rocks. They are indeed light-footed, leaping from rock to rock to get to their feeding grounds. Why don't they just swim? Because moray eels and octopuses are waiting for the daily pilgrimage. These predators will even leave the water to chase down a tasty crab dinner! Nature is brutal.

It's a treat any time we can watch a nature documentary narrated by Sir David Attenborough. This segment is from the BBC TV series Blue Planet II. It's not only beautiful and informative, but quite dramatic as we follow a crab on the dangerous route to his daily feast.  -via Born in Space

At the turn of the 20th century, European monarchs were all related to each other through Queen Victoria's children, if not through earlier international marriages. This big happy family took a blow when Tsar Nicholas II was arrested in Russia in 1917 and then executed along with his family in 1918. For years, European royalty blamed King George V, leader of the massive British Empire, for not rescuing his cousin.

But all along, the British Consul at Ekaterinburg, Thomas Hildebrand Preston, who was stranded in Siberia during World War I, was working feverishly to protect the British citizens around him and the Romanovs from the Bolsheviks and other revolutionary factions. As far as the Tsar's family was concerned, his efforts were futile. Ekaterinburg was liberated just a few days after the execution.

Preston continued his diplomatic career, and found himself in Lithuania when World War II broke out. In 1939 and 1940, he wrote out at least 1200 British visas for Lithuanian Jews, many of them illegal. After retiring from the diplomatic service, Preston worked to set the record straight when rumors of surviving Romanovs cropped up, which happened often, especially concerning the Grand Duchess Anastasia. Read about the unique diplomatic career of Sir Thomas Preston at Helen Rappaport's blog. -via Strange Company

We tend to learn history in segments, often separated geographically. We learn European history separately from Asian history or American history, and end up with a timeline in our heads for each of them. But if you pick a year, things were happening in all those places and more. Another thing that warps our sense of time is that many of the things we think of as "modern" are much older than we realize. They just weren't part of our everyday lives until they became affordable. When we link these disparate items and events together, it can mess with our sense of time. Who knew that Mohandas Gandhi was lurking around London during the killing spree of Jack the Ripper? Not that he was a suspect... at least not until now. Casual Lectures has a list of historical confluences that show us how our perception of history can be confused by compartmentalization.  

In the early 19th century, a French ship was spotted sinking off the coast of England, near a small town named Hartlepool. The only survivor was a monkey, dressed in a military uniform. This was during the Napoleonic Wars, and the citizens of Hartlepool had never seen a French person before. They interrogated the monkey, who responded in a manner they couldn't understand. Obviously it was speaking French. The monkey was tried on suspicion of being a French military spy, convicted, and hanged in public.

Was any part of this story true? While it sounds like an urban legend, making fun of the people of Hartlepool for not knowing the difference between a Frenchman and a monkey, there are possible elements that could have been mangled enough to result in this tale. Either way, the legend has survived long enough that Hartlepool has learned to embrace it. The story is reflected in their sports teams, and they even have a statue of the monkey at their marina! Read about the legend of the town that hanged a monkey at Amusing Planet. 

Rheinhessen, Germany's largest wine region, has a peculiar architectural legacy gaining notice as these buildings are turned into restaurants, cafes, and wine-tasting businesses. These are "cow chapels." Step into one, and you have the feeling of being in a church from hundreds of years ago. The large rooms and vaulted ceilings seem almost holy. But these repurposed buildings were once stables for cows. Why would anyone ever build a barn with vaulted ceilings?

That's an interesting story that goes back to the French Revolution, when one thing led to another and some dairy farmers ended up with land that held empty churches. It would be wasteful to tear down a church just to build a barn, so the cattle were fed and sheltered in these churches. That doesn't mean the current cow chapels were churches turned into stables. Those few early churches had certain architectural benefits that inspired other farmers to build their barns using the design of churches, and that's how cow chapels were born. The full story of these unique barns can be read at Atlas Obscura.

(Image credit: Gabriele Röhle)

We've long given names to hurricanes to keep up with them, and The Weather Channel started naming winter storms in 2012. But more people die due to heatwaves than to either hurricanes or blizzards. In that vein, meteorologist Guy Walton started naming heatwaves. Heatwaves have been named before, but not in the US. Last year, Walton gave heatwaves the names of dragons, such as Smaug, which killed 60,000 people in Europe. This year, he is giving heatwaves the names of oil and gas companies, to highlight their role in climate change.

Walton names heatwaves at category three or higher, which are heatwaves that are expected to kill people. In 2023, he's already used Heatwave Amoco, Heatwave BP, and Heatwave Chevron. The extreme temperatures currently around Portland, Oregon, where readings are more than 20 degrees higher than normal, got the name Heatwave Citgo. Walton has a list of twenty companies to use in alphabetical order. He explained his criteria at his blog, Guy on Climate. It is unlikely that any global association or governing body will adopt any naming convention for heatwaves, as the definition of a heatwave varies by country and by reporting organization. -via Kottke