The Napoleonic Wars came to an end on June 18, 1815, when a coalition of armies defeated the French Imperial Army. The Battle of Waterloo was fought in what is Belgium today, and around 50,000 men were killed or wounded. Many of those killed were buried quickly in mass graves, but there are strangely few remains today in that field. 

That's because looters descended on the battlefield almost immediately after the carnage. British tourists came in droves to pick up whatever they could find, with an eye to making a profit from battle souvenirs. Bullets, buttons, uniforms, and body parts were all scooped up, leading to an entire industry in trading an exhibiting the remains of the battle. Museums popped up nearby, and locals raked in money from those who weren't fast enough to find their own loot. Read about the commercial aftermath of the Battle of Waterloo at JStor Daily. -via Damn Interesting 

(Image credit: John Heaviside Clark) 

In the latest episode of the What If? series by Randall Munroe and Henry Reich (previously at Neatorama), the question is: "If someone's DNA suddenly vanished, how long would that person last?" While the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell, it's the DNA that tells a cell what to do. You might think that our cells should know what to do by now, and they would continue because of inertia, but that won't go on indefinitely. Each of our body organs have a different task, some more time-sensitive than others. 

As far as we know, this scenario has never happened. But to give an answer, they looked at a few scenarios in which our DNA becomes damaged and can't do its job properly. Those are mushroom poisoning, chemotherapy, and radiation poisoning. The consequences of each are pretty ghastly, even though they don't completely destroy the DNA in each cell. Without DNA, we would certainly be up a creek without a paddle. 

PS: Commenters cited the case of Hisashi Ouchi, which is a tragic and gruesome read. 

Imagine, if you will, seeing a DVD in the dollar bin called Almighty Thor. You might think it's a steal, getting a Marvel movie for just a dollar. And that was the point, somewhat. This movie came out the same year as the first Marvel Thor movie, but Marvel had nothing to do with it. Everyone knows when a new Marvel superhero movie is coming out, so The Asylum rushed to get in the game by spending $200,000 on Almighty Thor, starring Cody Deal, that premiered in the US only one day after Marvel's Thor. The low budget guaranteed it would make a profit, mainly from those who confused it with the MCU movie.  

This is an example of a mockbuster, a film designed to profit from another movie's publicity. Some are better than others, although they are all cheap. Some pass themselves off as parodies. Get a taste of what these movies are like in eight trailers (if you haven't already been fooled into watching some) at Cracked, where you'll find Avengers Grimm, Sinister Squad, Captain Battle: Legacy War, and others, including the most ridiculous of all, The Amazing Bulk. 

Since the extended versions of The Lord of the Rings movies are playing in select theaters to commemorate the silver anniversary of the the beginning of the trilogy (previously at Neatorama), Screen Junkies is taking a cockeyed look at them, one at a time. The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers is like many middle trilogy episodes, dark and violent, and downright depressing in places, to build the suspense for a triumphant end in the next film. Yeah, there's plenty of backstabbing and bloody warfare, but also a few new components. There's Gollum, which, thanks to motion capture, comes surprisingly close to your disgusting vision of him from the books. There are the ents, who came from The Wizard of Oz and then went on to give us Groot. And there's a thirsty focus on Aragorn, because the first movie was pretty ambiguous about making him the hero. But Saruman gets the best joke in this Honest Trailer. 

At the top of the world, there are four islands. They would form a donut, but four mighty rivers dividing these islands flow from the oceans into a sea between them, then form a whirlpool as the waters rush down into the earth. A "polar vortex," if you will. In the middle of the sea, a giant magnetic rock the size of a mountain stands. Its magnetic force pulls the needles of every compass on earth toward it, defining "north." At least that's what people thought before the North Pole was actually explored. 

You can see all this in the map above, produced by esteemed cartographer Gerhard Mercator for his groundbreaking atlas published in 1595. The layout came from a 14th-century book that has been lost, but was referred to in other works. The lore of the North Pole included inhabitants of at least one of the four islands. This account of the Arctic was accepted in the Middle Ages because who was to prove otherwise? This notion was gradually changed as explorers mapped islands in the Arctic, until it was completely dropped. Read about the early concept of the North Pole at Amusing Planet. 

You might think of birds as bird brained, but there are so many different types of bird that you cannot compare the smarts of, say, a chicken with a crow. Crows are pretty intelligent, and can use tools. But a particular bird of the species Cacatua goffiniana, also known as Goffin's cockatoo, pulled scientists into studying them. That was Figaro, who was clever enough to use a tool to get what he wanted. That put Figaro into a lab with other Goffin's cockatoos to see how good they are at problem-solving. The increasingly difficult tasks they solved surely made these birds regret the day they showed off in front of a human. Still, they proved they can figure out how to get what they want, up to a point. I was waiting for the cockatoos to attack the researchers for the ridiculous treasure hunts they forced on the birds. The subject matter is so wholesome that Ze Frank had to stretch to get any prurient jokes in here, but he managed it occasionally. There's a 70-second skippable ad at 4:30.  

In 2026, Disney will release a new Star Wars movie titled The Mandalorian and Grogu. In 2027, look for another, Star Wars: Starfighter. And that will be 50 years since the first Star Wars movie hit theaters. The question remains- will anyone have an appetite for these movies the way we did all those years ago? The original trilogy and the prequels came out with three years between each episode. There were 16 years between the end of the original trilogy and the beginning of the prequels. That's a generational difference, made obvious by the disdain '70s kids had for the prequels, which are now beloved by those who saw them in theaters as children.  

Then in 2012, Disney bought Star Wars and everything changed. We got five Star Wars movies in five years: the three Skywalker movies, two years apart, and Rogue One and Solo in between. After The Rise of Skywalker in 2019, Star Wars went to streaming TV. There have been seven live-action shows, six animated shows, and a revival of The Clone Wars. The excitement and anticipation for two new movies doesn't seem to match the vibe for any of pre-Disney movies. Read more on this subject at Gizmodo. 

(Image credit: Disney/Lucasfilm)

Jamie Costa was always a Robin Williams fan -he even looks like him. In 2020, Costa (previously at Neatorama) wanted to make a film biography of Williams, who died in 2014. He portrayed Williams in this five minute concept film, but in discussions, found out that Williams' family had no interest in turning it into a feature-length movie, so Costa pulled the short. Five years later, the family has no problem with Costa releasing the short online again, although they still do not want a full-length film. Any proceeds from the short will go to charity. 

This scene is set in 1982, on the set of the sitcom Mork & Mindy. Williams receives some devastating news, but the show must go on. It shows how Williams dealt with heartbreak by leaning into his comedy. Costa is uncanny in his role, with the looks, the voice, and the frenetic energy Williams was noted for. -via the Awesomer 

When you were in junior high, or middle school, you probably drew monsters or dinosaurs when you were sitting in class. Around 1487, Michelangelo drew demons, and painted them with oil paint. The work pictured here, titled The Torment of Saint Anthony has been identified as an early Michelangelo, painted when he was only 12 or 13 years old. The painting was never lost, but for 500 years, no one knew who the artist was, and it was classified as anonymous. 

When the painting was sold in 2008, the new owner took it to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where it was cleaned and examined, and suspicions began to mount that it was an early Michelangelo. That, combined with early accounts of young Michelangelo attempted the subject matter of St. Anthony in his first painting, convinced experts that this could be the painting they wrote about. He used an earlier engraving as a reference, but it was not an exact copy. The Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth purchased The Torment of Saint Anthony, betting that it was the real thing. Since then, more and more art experts have come to the same conclusion. Read how they discovered the artist behind the painting at Open Culture. An informative video accompanies the article. -via Boing Boing 

(Image credit: Michelangelo) 

William Shakespeare is the most famous writer in history, but we know little about his personal life. You may have seen the 1998 movie Shakespeare in Love or the recent (and Oscar-destined) Hamnet, but the former is fiction and the latter is highly fictionalized history. The truth is that people in the 16th century weren't as curious about artists as they were about the art, and Shakespeare's biography has a lot of holes in it. And maybe Shakespeare liked his privacy. 

Anyway, the documented facts about Shakespeare's personal life are few and far between, and only take up about half of this video from Weird History. Then there are plenty of rumors and tales that mostly arose after his death and may have been changed over time. They address those, too. What it all adds up to is that the most famous English artist of his time is now a rather blank slate for more stories to be written. 

If you've been cooking for some time, you know that you can take appropriate leftovers, throw them in a pot with some broth or juice and spices and make a pretty good soup. It's not so easy when baking or trying a new recipe, because proportions are crucial in those cases. That's why you need a slide rule as a kitchen tool. When you want use up that 3.3 ounces of horseradish before it gets old, and your recipe calls for 2 ounces, can you afford to double the recipe without ruining it? Now, I never learned to properly use a slide rule, and suffer the handicap of having to use math in the kitchen, but if you know what you're doing, a slide rule makes it much easier.

If you have no slide rule and would rather throw out the horseradish, the more interesting part of the article is how to compare recipes. Calculating the proportions of ingredients in different recipes will give you an idea of which recipe is spicier or runnier, and an idea of which ingredient proportions are important and which are up to your taste. Learn how to do this at Entropic Thoughts. -via Nag on the Lake 

(Image credit: ArnoldReinhold) 

When you find a beautiful dog in an unusual place or out in the middle of nowhere, there's a good chance that the previous owners dumped her because they were too cheap to have her spayed and now she's pregnant. This happened to me twice- one was even dumped right in my front yard. I managed to find homes for 15 puppies in total. Oh, you betcha, they both were spayed soon after. 

Joel and Scott found a Great Pyrenees dog right in their front yard. How did she get there? She had no microchip, and there were no lost dogs posted, so they kept her and named her Waco. Waco got along fine with their golden retriever Wellington, and fattened up quickly. That was because she was pregnant, and she soon gave birth to eight puppies who were all mini-Wacos. If you want to see more of these puppies, check out Wellington's TikTok channel. 


 

The subreddit No Stupid Questions implies a judgement-free place to ask about what you don't know. One reader posted, "In pre-cell phone movies, parents are shown giving babysitters numbers to restaurants to reach them in case of emergency. Is this a real thing and how did it work? How would the restaurant know who I am to hand me the phone?" This is not a stupid question, just one outside of their experience. And it sure makes us feel old. 

Yes, this was a thing back in the prehistoric time of land lines. Restaurants knew about babysitters. If they got such a call, they would either find the parents by a description, or call out a name, or check the reservation list. But no, they wouldn't just hand you the phone. The parent would go to the front desk to take the call. Sure, in the swankiest of restaurants, like in the movies, they might have a long phone cord or extra plugs in the dining area, but that was rare. The post at reddit has more than 350 responses, and some of those are stories of such emergency calls that are very much worth sharing. Continue reading to see them.

Cats love to stroll along kitchen counters because they are human-high and often contain tasty or at least interesting things. People have tried many methods to stop them, but all cats are different, so nothing works consistently. I have one cat who roams the counter, leaving evidence that she scratches herself with my cactus garden. I cope by putting dirty dishes away quickly and not leaving uncovered food out. And cleaning the counter often. She has me trained. 

Cookie is a hard case, though. He roamed the whole kitchen and was not susceptible to human tricks. The guy behind the YouTube channel Lab-X is an engineer, so he built an AI-assisted robot with a squirt gun built in, and trained it to recognize Cookie and deter him. He named it Puffy. There were plenty of tests and failures and tweaks to be made before it actually worked. If you don't care about the tech stuff, you'll still get a kick out of Cookie's antics. My cat would spot the robot and knock him off the counter immediately.    

Pissing off my friends in valheim by building dollar generals pic.twitter.com/zjAZNPdauh

— Greg the Sorcerer (@gregthesorcerer) January 11, 2026

Valheim is an open-world multiplayer survival and sandbox game set in the era of the Vikings. You use natural resources to build your own tools, weapons, and shelters. What could possibly go wrong? Well, you could get killed, but besides that, you might find yourself playing with Greg. 

Greg The Sorcerer saw a need in the Valheim world, and filled it by building a Dollar General Store, complete with bad fluorescent lighting. And you know when one Dollar General pops up, there's always going to be more, so he continued to populate the Viking set with more Dollar General stores. It's a genius trolling strategy, designed to pull other players out of the fantasy world and back to reality. In other words, he is spoiling everything. Twitter, excuse me, X users joined in to suggest a Waffle House, and so Greg The Sorcerer made it happen. And he kept building Dollar General stores. PC Gamer tells the story, and suggests that of any of the businesses go belly up, a Spirit Halloween should replace them. -via Metafilter