Europe is currently undergoing a drought that has left rivers running dry and reservoirs reduced to mud puddles. It's been said to be the worst drought in Europe in 500 years. So what happened 500 years ago?

The year 1540 began with Italy going almost 200 days without rain. The River Thames went so low that the sea flowed in and reversed its course. The Rhine, Elbe, and Seine also dried to the point where people could wade across. Without water, sewage could not be swept away and diseases broke out. Crops failed and wildfires thrived. Martin Luther thought it was a sign of the End Times. People all over looked for a scapegoat, such as witches and refugees. The upside to the drought was that vintage 1540 wine was strangely good, made from dried-up grapes with a high sugar content. That was a good thing, as what water they had to drink was pretty nasty. Read about the drought of 1540 and what makes the European drought of 2022 different at Smithsonian. -via Damn Interesting

Can you solve a logic puzzle that was featured in the the 2022 Brazilian Mathematical Olympiad of Public Schools? The information you are given is 1. Pinocchio always lies, and 2. Pinocchio says "All my hats are green." What can you deduce from that? Duh, it means Pinocchio has at least one hat that isn't green. Then they reveal that that this is a multiple choice question, and none of the answers are the one you thought! After I calmed down, I thought, well, one answer is pretty close to mine, although incomplete. But wait, maybe he has no hats! That's silly, we can see from the picture that he does. However, the picture isn't really necessary, and probably doesn't accompany every version of the puzzle. So then we get a lesson in a "vacuously true statement." By the time we get through the video, you realize you were correct all along. Using a confusing multiple choice answer format forces you to justify your choice. And then learn something. -via Nag on the Lake

Siena Awards has completed their competition for their Drone Photo Awards competition for 2022. The Photographer of the Year prize went to Armand Sarlangue for the image above. It's an overhead view of a new fissure in the Fagradalsfjall volcano in Iceland. There were prizes awarded in several categories, including urban, wildlife, sport, people, nature, abstract, wedding, and more. Below is "Water Lily Harvesting" by Shibasish Saha, which was the runner-up in the people category.



You can see all the winning images at the awards gallery, or see them in a ranked list on one page at Bored Panda.

 
During one of those huge patriotic displays that North Korea is known to stage, the Korean People's Army State Merited Chorus and Symphony Orchestra (the North Korean military's musical unit) performed a symphonic version of "Killing in the Name" by Rage Against the Machine. If you think that's highly unlikely, you'd be right. This is an edit, but a particularly masterful one from Lars Von Retriever in which you can listen and watch and start to question whether it might be real after all. Well, the video is real and the audio is real, but they didn't come from the same source. The audio is from a performance by Rockin' 1000 (NSFW lyrics). Someone in the comments mentioned that this video might cause an international incident, but YouTube is not accessible in North Korea except to government elites, and they wouldn't want to draw attention to it. -via Laughing Squid

The first official UFO sighting occurred in June of 1947 when pilot Kenneth Arnold spotted nine objects he couldn't identify as he flew over Mt. Rainier. Once his experience was published in papers across the nation, the floodgates opened and everyone saw flying saucers. The kicker was that Arnold never said the objects were shaped like saucers. He described the movement of the objects with the words “flew like they take a saucer and throw it across the water,” meaning they skipped. But the term flying saucer or flying disc caught on and that's what everyone else was seeing.

On July 8 of that year, the army released a statement on a "flying disc" recovered from a ranch near Roswell, New Mexico (that later was identified as a weather balloon). An article about it appeared in the Anchorage Daily Times that same day, which was the paper's first ever mention of a flying disc. The article said, “None have been reported in Alaska, yet.” The very next day, three teenage girls reported a disc-shaped UFO over Elmendorf Air Force Base in Anchorage. Coincidence?

Whatever happened, the very first movie about flying saucers, titled The Flying Saucer, was released in 1950. It was set in Alaska, and had a lot to do with Soviet spies. That's when the sightings of UFOs in Alaska really took off, with a whole slew of them reported in the 1950s. Read about flying saucer fever in Alaska, and see the full movie at the Anchorage Daily News. -via Strange Company

In the children's book Horton Hatches the Egg, Mayzie the lazy bird leaves Horton the elephant with her egg while she takes off to have a good time. This happens a lot in nature, as there are quite a few bird species that have evolved to outsource nest building, egg brooding, and caring for young to other bird species. That leaves the parasitic bird more time to go breed again. The victim, the industrious bird who built the nest, is infused with maternal hormones and/or bad eyesight and will perform its duty -sometimes. Over time, bird species have developed techniques for fighting back against parasitic birds, and the battle is on to see whose offspring get a good survivable childhood. The parents fight, the chicks fight, and there's a lot of lying and disguises and covert operations involved. No one is better equipped to draw us into the struggle than Ze Frank, who narrates the carnage.

A skeleton discovered in the Indonesian part of Borneo shows signs of sophisticated amputation surgery performed 31,000 years ago. That's 20,000 years earlier than we had evidence of before. A person of unknown sex died at around 19 or 20 years of age, and was missing a foot from surgical amputation.

The lower third of the person’s leg was missing, and the tibia and fibula — the bones between the knee and ankle — ended in a clean cut. This level of precision indicates that the limb was not lost in an accident or an animal attack. The bones lacked the type of mark typically left by an infection, suggesting that the wound had been cleaned and protected from contamination. Furthermore, the small size of the left tibia and fibula compared with the right ones and the healing of the bones show that the amputation occurred during childhood and at least six to nine years before death.

So the residents of Borneo at the time were not only skilled in surgery, with its accompanying pain and bleeding, but were able to prevent infection afterward and then support a young person with a missing foot. Add this to the growing body of discoveries that tell us our conventional image of cave people as "primitive" is completely wrong. Read more about this discovery at Nature. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: T. R. Maloney et al./Nature)

If you want a really cool job title like "professional GeoGuessr," you have to put in the time and effort to become very, very good at it. Nine years ago, we introduced you to the game GeoGuessr. Since then, it has grown so much that there's a GeoGuessr World Cup competition. The premise of the game is easy: you are given an image from Google street view, which can be anywhere in the world, and you try to guess where it is. It's a real kick for geography nerds, but you'll never be as good at it as Trevor Rainbolt. He can identify a country from one image in less than a second! How does he do it? Observation and practice. He learned little details that make places different from each other, like infrastructure, signage, and even the appearance of the soil. He's played the game so much that he can recognize those small clues in patterns quickly. Here he explains what he looks for, but even when you understand what he's doing, his speed and confidence is truly impressive. If you want to see more, check out Rainbolt's YouTube channel. -via Laughing Squid

There are a lot of older people in fixed incomes who have listed spare rooms or spare buildings on Airbnb to raise a little extra money. Joining them is 96-year-old Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom. The queen has quite a few pieces of property that aren't part of the official royal palaces. Her private Sandringham estate is where the royal family spends their Christmas holiday, but is otherwise only occupied by caretakers. Beginning in February, you can rent out one house on the property for £354 a night, with a three-night minimum. No you won't be staying at the main house pictured above, but in the former home of the queen's head gardener. Her Balmoral estate in Scotland will also be listed on Airbnb, with individual cottages rates ranging between £555 and £1,620 for a week's stay. No rentals will be taken when the queen is in residence, but you can always say you vacationed on royal property -if you can get a booking. See inside the accommodations at The Daily Mail. -via Fark

(Image credit: Christine Matthews)

Stephen King's first published novel was Carrie in 1973. It established him as an author to watch, and since then he's produced 75 books, plus short stories, magazine articles, and other media. Some of those books veer from his normal horror format; some are compilations of short stories. Some you've never heard of, and some became pop culture icons, such as The Shining and It. Some folks only know Stephen King from the movies, which might make a ranking of his books a little hard to take, because King has had variable control over how films based on his stories turn out. Book lovers may have some strong disagreements with a ranking of all 75 Stephen King books at Esquire, but that's what rankings are for. Each listing has a short synopsis, a critique, and a link to buy the book. You might even find a new book to read here! -via Metafilter

The firm MV Werften had a lofty dream, to build the world's largest cruise ship. And they did. The Global Dream II is 1,122 feet long, 20 stories high, and can hold 9,000 passengers. It was budgeted at $1.4 billion dollars to build, and is not quite finished. If it were to be finished, it would come in a just a little over that amount. But it will not be finished, and will not carry 9,000 passengers.

The shipbuilding company went bankrupt in January. They've been trying to sell the Global Dream II ever since. But between the pandemic and inflation, people aren't clamoring to go on cruises the way they used to, and no cruise line wants to buy the world's largest cruise ship. Meanwhile, the German shipyard where the boat is docked, along with its companion the Global Dream I, is scheduled to switch over to building military ships, and the cruise liners need to be out by the end of the year. If no buyer is found before then, they will be taken apart for scrap. So if your dream is to float on the ocean with 9,000 strangers and one water supply, you may have to find a new dream. Read more about the record-breaking ship that turned into a white elephant at Jalopnik.

(Image credit: Domino's New Zealand)

A family went out to a Domino's Pizza outlet in New Zealand. When they got home, they realized that one of their children had lost his beloved dinosaur toy named Bitey. The parents called the restaurant, and the staff found the missing T. rex. The family was relieved, but it was late, and they said they'd come back the next day to fetch the dinosaur. So the staff took the opportunity to give Bitey an experience he'd never forget. They put him to work!

(Image credit: Domino's New Zealand) 

Bitey got his own name tag and a little paper hat, and was taught how to take orders by phone, how to ladle on pizza sauce, and how to wash dishes. We have our doubts as to how many dishes he really washed. After all, he is a T. rex and has those tiny little arms. Read the story and see all the pictures and some reactions at Bored Panda.

Jordan Peele took the cinema world by storm when he wrote and directed Get Out. He followed that up with Us. Both horror films had a major twists, which viewers, reviewers, and media all tried to keep secret because they added so much to the experience. His third film is Nope, and everyone decided to just not talk about the plot or what it's about because we figured there would be a twist. But when it was released, they didn't talk about it because no one understood it even after seeing it. It's about aliens, apparently. Is it horror? Is it a science fiction film? A Western? This Honest Trailer makes it clear that Nope is all three. The video does contain spoilers, but it can't really describe the movie in ways we are used to. That doesn't mean Nope isn't a good movie. Both reviewers and audiences generally like it as a clever satire full of delightful moments, if not as terrifying as Peele's first two films. If he keeps switching out our expectations like that while giving audiences a good time, I will look forward to a lot more from Jordan Peele. 

An email storm or “replyallcalypse” is when someone sends an email message to a list when they meant to send it to one person. Or instead of looking up that one person's email address, they reply to an old message from them sent to a list and use "reply all" instead of "reply." The storm gains steam as many people respond and point out the error or else want to be taken off the list, but they also use "reply all." We reported on one such storm from Berkeley a few years ago. But now it's happened to an even bigger list.

The US Air Force has an email address that can send a notice to everyone with an Air Force address. This can be useful for some things, like explaining a new policy that applies to all USAF members. But one would think that an address like that would be restricted as to who can use it. Instead, a clerical employee at Ramstein AFB in Germany requested help with a computer issue using the universal address instead of her department email list. Suddenly the entire Air Force worldwide knew that she couldn't remove an outdated logo from her screen. Replies came in from all over. One was from Lt. Colonel Matthew S. Judd at Wright-Patterson Air Force base in Ohio.

Good Morning, I’m sorry to hear about your computer issue, I really have no idea what your issue is or have a good solution to the problem, but here’s a shot anyway:

Unplug device, head for the second story, open window and throw it out the window, should get rid of the green screen. I hope this helps.   

The US Air Force has 328,255 active personnel. You can imagine how many responded to the original email using "reply all," which surely disrupted official business for some time. Read more about the Air Force SNAFU at Gizmodo.

(Image credit: Airman 1st Class Melissa Copeland)

Here's another Star Trek supercut from John DiMarco (previously at Neatorama) with no Kirk, Spock, or other characters from the original series. This is about the Borg, which the Federation didn't encounter until Star Trek: The Next Generation. But they keep coming back to all the subsequent series. The Borg keep trying to tell us that we will be assimilated and resistance is futile, but we all know better. We can resist all we want, or we can be assimilated and then come back to our normal selves; it's been done a lot. Hearing it repeated so many times makes the word "futile" seem altogether odd. And then we see that Seven of Nine (and a couple of other characters) pronounce it like an American in Star Trek: Voyager. That's kind of jarring after we've heard the Borg pronounce the word in British English for so many years. -via Laughing Squid