Can a band produce a new song when they broke up more than 50 years ago and half of the band members are dead? In an interview with the BBC, Paul McCartney announced that a new Beatles song, which he referred to as a "final Beatles record" will be released later this year. There have been plenty of Beatles songs released since the band went their separate ways, but the catalog of previously unreleased recordings from rehearsals, concerts, and demos surely has a limit.

McCartney did not identify the song, but speculation is that it will be "Now and Then," which John Lennon wrote in 1978. He recorded it as a demo on a tape that was given to McCartney sometime after Lennon died in 1980. The three surviving Beatles worked on the song in 1995, but abandoned the effort because there was an annoying buzzing on Lennon's tape recording. And George Harrison didn't like the song. Harrison died in 2001.

But now we have artificial intelligence programs that can clean up the noise and distortion from an old cassette tape, and there are recordings of the 1995 session, so we can soon hear all four Beatles performing together on a song that was written after they broke up. But will it really be a Beatles song? The discussion at Metafilter brings up all sorts of questions, not only about the authenticity of this project, but the ethics involved. After all, half of the Beatles cannot approve of the release, nor even register an opinion on their own art. We haven't heard from Ringo Starr on the project, or how involved he is with it. What you you think?  

(Image credit: Henry Grossman)

Sir Isaac Newton's laws of gravity had profound meaning for astronomers, because the mass of the planets around us, their distance, and their orbits followed these laws and made sense of what they observed. But at the time, there were only six known planets besides earth, from Mercury to Uranus. Most of them followed Newton's laws to a T., as calculated by astronomer Alexis Bouvard in 1821. But then there was Uranus, which progressed more slowly than Newton's laws would predict. Were those laws of gravitation flawed? Or was there something different about Uranus? An assistant astronomer at the Paris Observatory, Urbain Le Verrier, recorded variations in the orbits of both Uranus and Mercury. Le Verrier figured there might be another planet on the other side of Uranus, which would explain those variations. Using his hypothesis and the Uranus's orbit to chart the position of the unseen planet, Le Verrier knew where it should be, but couldn't get permission to use Paris's biggest telescopes to take a look. A colleague he knew in Berlin had access to an observatory, though, and that's how Neptune was discovered.

Le Verrier was rightfully honored for his discovery of Neptune, the first planet to be tracked by indirect information before it was observed. So then he turned his attention to the variations in Mercury's orbit and the idea that there could be another planet beyond Mercury even closer to the sun. When amateur astronomer Dr. Edmond Lescarbault observed a disc racing across the surface of the sun, Le Verrier announced another discovery- the planet Vulcan.

Now, you probably only know the planet Vulcan from Star Trek, and not from your science classes. You know what happened to Neptune (it's still there), but what about Vulcan? Read that story at Damn Interesting.

The earth has about 36 billion acres of dry land. Who owns those acres? Madison Trust Company put together a list of who owns the most land of anyone on earth. You may have your own little acre, or part of one, but that's nothing compared to what the British royal family owns- 6,600,000,000 acres! That puts them at the top of the biggest landowners on earth. And we thought the British Empire was a thing of the past. What's really impressive is that, of the top 19 landowners, only one is an individual person. That is Gina Rinehart of Australia, who personally owns 23,969,000 acres, putting her at #4 on the list. The next individual landowner is at #20. The rest are families, corporations, or communities. An awful lot of them are in Australia, which is a big country with a small population concentrated in the eastern cities.

Did you guess the #2 landowner in the world? It is the Catholic Church. You might feel better about #3, which is the Inuit People of Nunavut, who own 87,500,000 acres in Northern Canada. You can see the list in both infographic and text form, plus more information about what they are using their land for, in this post.

-via Digg

Eleven-year-old Georgiana Crimsworth experiences some abdominal pain before bed and then finds blood on her sheets. Her worst nightmare is coming true- she's dying! Of course, Georgiana's imagination took off to envision the absolute worst outcome. And even when her mother tries to explain, her presumptions only get worse. The horror! You might find it amusing (I did), but this happens all too often. As adults, we forget what it's like to be a child with no experience or context. Pain and blood equal dying if you don't know any other reason for it, so what Georgiana thought was perfectly reasonable. And that's why parents must think ahead and prepare children with what they need to know. The comments at YouTube are full of similar stories because girls weren't prepared early enough.

This award-winning student film was produced by Lauryn Anthony and Anushka Tina Nair at the Ringling College of Art and Design.

Today, being a celebrity and being transgender are separate things. The few transgender celebrities you can name were celebrities first who then transitioned: Caitlyn Jenner, Eliot Page, Lana and Lily Wachowski, etc. In 1952, all it took was daring to transition to become a celebrity. That happened to Christine Jorgenson, who spent two years in Denmark transitioning and expected to return to the US to live a quiet life as a woman. But someone leaked the story to the press, which caused a sensation. Jorgensen delayed returning home, and when she arrived in New York February of 1953, she was confronted by 300 reporters.

Although gender affirmation surgery was pioneered in Berlin in the 1920s and '30s, the Nazis shut that down. Most Americans first heard about it when Jorgensen's story hit the news. I recall hearing of the 1970 movie The Christine Jorgensen Story and thought "They can do that?" While Jorgensen was appalled at the unwanted publicity, she also heard from many people who wanted to follow in her footsteps. It was for them that she decided to go ahead and embrace her celebrity. And she also needed the money. Jorgensen gave interviews and took to the stage as a singer and dancer. Read the story of Christine Jorgensen at Mental Floss.

(Image credit: Maurice Seymour)

What could be more heartbreaking than a cat left alone while his human is at work? An obviously lonely and talented cat named George Rufus sang a deep and profound song about his misery, and touched the heart of South African musician David Scott, known as The Kiffness (previously at Neatorama). Or at least it's deep and profound for a cat. Never mind that we should be alarmed at a cat singing in English. It's an audio form of pareidolia, and we cat owners hear it all the time.

Consumed with empathy over the cat's predicament and moved by his performance, The Kiffness added a musical accompaniment and a few more lyrics to bring George's plaintive blues to life. By the time this song is over, you'll be shedding a tear for a poor lonely cat. Go give your kitty a hug and maybe you'll feel better. -via Nag on the Lake

The Exxon Valdez ran aground in Alaska in 1989 and spilled ten million gallons of oil on the shore. How do you clean up that much oil from the seashore? At first, it was power washing, pushing the oil from the shoreline into the water so it could be scooped up easier. But the power washing itself was damaging the ecosystem, so the cleanup crews limited that procedure to some places, while leaving others alone. A car-sized boulder called Mearns Rock was left with oil on it. The rock was named after Alan Mearns of NOAA's hazmat team.

In the 33 years since the cleanup, Mearns Rock has been photographed every year, first by NOAA, and afterward by volunteers. The rock, exposed to oil, sun, rain, ocean water, and air, stands firmly in the same spot but plays host to different life forms year by year. Scientists and conservationists get an idea of which plants and animals recovered from the spill and how long they took to do it, and which species never returned. Read about the recovery from the Exxon Valdez spill and how Mearns Rock plays it part at Hakai magazine. -via Atlas Obscura

(Image credit: Alan Mearns/NOAA)

It never occurred to me how much the TV show The Dukes of Hazzard was like Star Wars. Really, why would anyone think about that? Nebulous Bee thought about it, 40 years later, and laid the theme song from Dukes over footage from the first Star Wars trilogy. The Dukes of Hazzard was a comedy, while Star Wars was a space adventure, but they mesh well, from a certain point of view. But the real genius in this is the casting. Sure, we can see Han Solo and Chewbacca as the Duke boys, and Leia Organa taking the part of their cousin Daisy Duke, but everyone else gets a role, too.

If you liked that, you might want to check out what Nebulous Bee did to the Obi-Wan Kenobi TV series (twice) and The Mandalorian. Yeah, the humor in some of these mashups will depend on your age and how well you recognize what these Star Wars properties are mixed with, but I think you will get a kick out of them.

There's nothing odd about a lot of graves near a church, but one church in the village of Luzino, in the Kashubia area of Poland, apparently didn't thoroughly map where their parishioners were buried. The church followed the European practice of occasionally digging up graves and storing bones in an ossuary to free up room for more graves. But during recent road work, excavators found skeletons that had been missed or forgotten- 450 of them!

The skeletons are believed to be from the 19th century, when people were afraid that the dead would rise again to cause havoc among the living. In other words, vampires. Researchers are studying the remains, and report that about 30% of the skeletons show evidence that measures had been taken to keep them underground. Many skeletons had been disinterred, their heads cut off, and their skulls placed down by the legs before re-burial. Some had rocks placed between their jaws to the same end.

Archaeologists also found three forgotten underground ossuaries containing piles of disarticulated bones from earlier disinterments. Read the full account of the grim discovery at The First News.

-via reddit

(Image credit: UG Luzino)

In any governing body, you run into a problem with any one person having ultimate authority. What do you do with an evil, incompetent, or otherwise disliked ruler? With monarchies, there's nothing to be done outside of all-out war. In modern governments, there are built-in systems to remove elected officials. But in the Catholic Church, you have the pope and his ultimate authority, but it's an elected position, and the cardinals have some say about who is qualified. These two ideas butted up against each other in the 14th century. The cardinals could elect a pope, but whether they can remove one against his will was another question. So the church ended up with three different popes! There was Urban VI in Rome, Clement VII in Avignon, and John XXII in Pisa. By the time John was named Pope, the title in Rome and Avignon had been passed to others, making the succession even more confusing. The story is simplified for modern audiences in this TED-Ed lesson from Joëlle Rollo-Koster. -via Nag on the Lake

An unnamed blogger is sharing his account of living in Antactica at the site named brr. He's an IT worker who spent a year at McMurdo Station, then moved to the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station. He is part of the small crew overwintering at the South Pole, where they are almost to midwinter. The latest post explains how food works in Antarctica. When supply flights stop in autumn, they are on their own until November. They have plenty of frozen food, plenty of dried food, but fresh food will be a dream for another five months.

He even took a picture of the very last "fresh" egg at the station, as it was ceremoniously fried. The food they will eat between now and spring is almost all frozen, sometimes for years. The cold storage is natural, but extreme. A bucket of ice cream stored at -70°F has to be brought inside for days before it is an edible temperature of 0°F. The station does have a greenhouse, but it's small and any salads have to be carefully rationed. Yeah, there's plenty of food, but milk and eggs will be the powdered kind until spring arrives. Nobody said overwintering at the South Pole would be easy. -via Damn Interesting

Spokesman Roger Horton is back with an ad for a bar. This is not about the dive down the street where you drop by and know every customer already, because you saw the same people there yesterday. No, this is a newer place, with pretentious menu items to match the pretentious drink prices. This one has taken an Irish theme, without much real connection to Ireland. An authentic Dublin-style Hawaiian pizza? Is that some kind of a joke? Yes, it is, but it's not all that far off from the fake ambience this bar is trying its best to exude. The only thing cringier is seeing Roger in a dress, as he plays the waitress as well as the bartender. Well, the experience won't be so bad if you drink enough. You'll just have to suffer a hangover and an empty wallet.

You've heard about Atlantis and El Dorado, legendary cities that disappeared and may have never existed at all. This year, we also learned about Dunwich and Heracleion that really did disappear into the ocean. Germany has its own lost city, named Rungholt. Except it was in Denmark when it disappeared.

Rungholt was once thought to be a legend, and it had its own legendary story. The city was a den of iniquity, having grown prideful and complacent due to its wealth. One night, some drunken young men harassed a priest to give last rites to a pig. The priest asked God to send a punishment to the young men, and when the priest left town, a huge storm wiped out the entire city, and it was never seen again. But the legend says that afterward you could hear the sound of the church's bell ring from the North Sea.

That storm was the Grote Mandrenke, or Saint Marcellus's flood, of January 1362. It raged across several countries and killed around 30,000 people. It also changed the coastline of Denmark. Rungholt, a port city of around 3,000 people, was wiped out and left underwater.

The first signs of what might be Rungholt were found in 1921 near the islands created by the storm. Archaeologists have been studying relics in the mudflats of the UNESCO Wadden Sea World Heritage Site. Last month, they found the remains of a large church near the island of Südfall. They had already found a large drainage system, dykes, and two smaller churches. This discovery may confirm that the excavation area is indeed, the lost city of Rungholt. -via Strange Company

(Image credit: Ralf Roletschek)

Microsoft Office 97 came with a virtual assistant named Clippy, an animated paper clip. He could be helpful if you had no idea what you were doing, but as you mastered the program, Clippy became more annoying by the day. He was cute, but could be snarky at times, and always managed to treat you like an idiot. But Clippy managed to escape his original job and became a meme, so now he is less an annoyance and more of nostalgic reminder of 1990s computer culture. You know, if it weren't for Clippy, we might not have Siri or Alexa now. Or we might have a really annoying Siri or Alexa now.     

You wouldn't be at all surprised that the guy who created Clippy was a children's book illustrator. Or at least he is now. Kevan J. Atteberry tells the story of how Clippy came about. -via Nag on the Lake

A big portion of the Netherlands is below sea level, and the Dutch are masters at controlling water levels to maintain that land. The city of Utrecht is shot through with dams, canals, and locks as part of that water control system. That caused a problem for migrating fish. Many species travel from the Vecht river to the shallower water of the Kromme river in order to spawn. But getting through Utrecht was an obstacle course, until ecologist Mark van Heukelum came up with the Fish Doorbell, or Visdeurbel.

The Fish Doorbell starts with an underground camera that anyone can access online. When fish gather near a lock, a user can activate the doorbell, and an operator will open the lock for the fish to pass through. The system has been online three springs now, and has gathered a community of "fisherman" around the world who monitor the canals of Utrecht to aid the fish. They are like birdwatchers, trading sightings of different species of fish with each other. Read about this awesome project at Atlas Obscura, and you might just find yourself with a new hobby. -via Strange Company

(Image credit: Хомелка)