As soon as Benjamin Franklin flew a kite in an electrical storm (and didn't die) and then invented the lightning rod, the idea was appropriated by the fashion world. Electricity was such a modern concept that it became the next big thing for a while. Lightning rod fashion reached its height in fashionable France, where one could purchase a lightning rod hat (le chapeau paratonnerre) equipped with a grounding wire dragging behind the wearer, or carry a lightning rod umbrella (le parapluie-paratonnerre). If it worked to keep a house safe from lightning, why wouldn't it also work for a pedestrian on the streets?

That was just the beginning of electrical fashion. As soon as the battery was invented, the trendiest people rushed to wear jewelry or decorate their clothing with lights. You could even hide the battery in your bustle! Read about the 18th-century fad for electric fashion at Messy Nessy Chic.

Warning: this video may induce a little queasiness. We've seen heart-stopping POV videos of mountain bikers wearing helmet cams. The next iteration of this type of videography is from the view of a FPV (first person view) drone. In this sequence, we follow champion racer Kade Edwards down the Red Bull Hardline downhill mountain bike race track in Wales, an extreme track if you ever saw one. Can Edwards stay upright on this terrifying run? Can the drone keep up with him? Can the drone navigate through thick groves of trees? (Spoiler- not in the first attempt.) Can we keep our stomachs from leaping while watching? Edwards makes the run look easy, although we all know that it takes both skill and daring, and the drone pilot did a fantastic job, drawing kudos from professional FPV drone pilots. Any of us would have crashed and burned in either role. -via TYWKIWDBI

Agnes Fults of Kimberly, Idaho, gave birth to three daughters in 1934. Josephine, Julene, and Joyce Fults joined their older sister Mabel and father Alton and made the family locally famous. The triplets were followed by local newspapers as they grew up. But Agnes disappeared from the public record in 1939. Agnes' sister Martha Hagerman took charge of her four nieces, and moved them to Tennessee in 1940, but then returned to Idaho in 1949.

The case of Agnes Fults' disappearance was brought to light when Julene's granddaughter Marsha Trotter and Mabel's granddaughter Rebecca Hardesty met through Ancestry.com and learned they were second cousins. They were both looking for any record of their great-grandmother Agnes after 1939. They knew from their grandmothers' recollections that their mother had simply disappeared, and they weren't supposed to talk about it, ever. The family story was that Agnes abandoned her family, but the rumor mill in Kimberly had it that Agnes was killed and buried in a potato field. There was no missing person's report ever filed. Trotter and Hardesty recently contacted Kimberly police, and they are opening an investigation, which will include the use of ground-penetrating radar on the empty plot where the Fults home once stood. Read the fascinating story of an 84-year-old mystery at KTVB.  -via Strange Company

No, you won't die if you hear the sound of an Aztec death whistle, but you'll hear it a lot in this video, and you might want to be ready with the volume control. It can cause a jump scare in the people in the next room, or make children cry. It's a small instrument that looks like no more than a duck call, but the sound it produces is like a terrified person screaming beyond control. If you were in enemy territory, or had the possibility of an invading army, hearing this in the night would make the hairs on your back rise up. Not knowing what's going on and hearing what sounds like someone dying would ruin your evening considerably. James Orgill of The Action Lab (previously at Neatorama) actually made some Aztec death whistles with a 3D printer. He tells us both the history and science of these whistles, and blows those darn whistles quite a few times. That's an interesting and sneaky way to lead up to an ad for the 3D printer. -via Digg

World Gorilla Day has been celebrated on September 24 every year since 2017. That date was chosen because it was on that day in 1967 that the Karisoke Research Center in Rwanda was founded by gorilla researcher Dian Fossey.

Gorillas are the world's largest primate. There are two species, the eastern gorilla and the western gorilla. All gorillas are classified as Critically Endangered, with the exception of the subspecies called the mountain gorilla, which is classified as Endangered. This weekend many zoos are holding special programs so you can learn more about gorillas. This includes the Los Angeles Zoo, the Cincinnati Zoo, the Little Rock Zoo, the Oklahoma City Zoo, the Louisville Zoo, the San Antonio Zoo, the Franklin Park Zoo in Boston, and possibly at another zoo near you.

And if you can't get to your local zoo for the festivities this weekend, you can read about gorillas and see a gallery of enchanting photos of them at Smithsonian. 

(Image credit: Robert from Uganda gorilla safari tours)

In the latest edition of Ze Frank's True Facts series, we learn about reef coral. Yeah, it's an animal, although what we see of them are their shells, which make a reef. One animal of coral is called a polyp.

You might wonder how Ze could ever make a bawdy, silly, joke-filled video about coral, but he manages to do so. What we would call building a reef, he describes as a polyp "farting crystals." You get the idea. Yeah, it's a ridiculous way of telling a story, but that makes it much easier to learn how coral works. Or at least more likely to be remembered. See, already I am impressed that coral reproduces both sexually and by cloning themselves. And they have several ways of eating. The images in this video are beautiful to look at, but gross when you find out what's really happening. There's a one-minute skippable ad at the five-minute mark.

Wooden artifacts from the Stone Age are very rare because organic material tends to break down over time. But in 2019, a pair of logs were discovered at a river bank in Zambia that seemed ancient. They were deliberately connected at a right angle by carved notches in each log, like putting together Lincoln Logs. Or a real log cabin, for that matter. Archaeologists think it may have been a walkway, or part of a pen for storing firewood or food. Or it could have been the base of a dwelling. Now the results of a luminescence dating test are in, and the logs are 476,000 years old! That makes them, linked together, the oldest manmade wooden structure ever found.

But what kind of man made this? The oldest Homo sapiens fossils are 300,000 years old, and they were found in Israel. The people that used tools to make these logs fit together had a brain sophisticated enough to plan their work and carry it out with stone tools over time. The discovery also hints that wood was a more common material for Stone Age life than we knew. Read about the discovery and what it might mean at CNN. -via reddit

(Image credit: Professor Larry Barham/University of Liverpool)

If you enjoy the dry humor of engineering nerds, wait until you see three of them together! A Finnish industrial company called Stalatube wanted to show off their stainless steel hollow sections. That's a pretty esoteric product, and their engineer Pekka is not all that charismatic (and likely fictional), so how will they draw attention? They team up with Finnish madman Lauri Vuohensilta (previously at Neatorama) of the Hydraulic Press Channel and and Mythbusters' Jamie Hyneman, now a professor at  LUT University in Lappeenranta, Finland.

They put different grades of steel through Lauri's hydraulic press test, with the results you might expect. Then they go on to test the steel with heat. But that's not enough, so they take their samples to a testing facility where the steel is further tortured. Hyneman is duly impressed with the product, but that's still not good enough for Pekka. There's more to come; the second episode of this ad series will drop on October 6. Yes, it's an ad, but if you are going to watch a ten-minute ad for anything today, you'd want it to be this one. -via Metafilter

The United States claimed the biggest prize in the Cold War space race when we landed men on the moon in 1969. However, the Soviets had many firsts, like the first satellite, the first man to orbit the earth, and the first woman in space. There have been some horrific disasters, too. We all know about Apollo 1, the Challenger explosion, and the space shuttle Columbia. But the Soviets beat us in that, too, with a disaster that killed more than 100 people and was kept secret for almost thirty years.

On October 24, 1960, the USSR rolled out a new, improved rocket called the R-16 that used two toxic and corrosive chemicals for fuel that automatically ignited when they were combined. What could possibly go wrong? The rocket had been rushed through its testing phase in order to launch in time for the 43rd anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, and to impress premiere Nikita Khrushchev. There were plenty of people at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan to witness the launch. One thing led to another, and before you know it, there's a 120-meter-wide fireball on the launch pad. Many died instantly, while others were set on fire but couldn't flee the scene because the asphalt beneath their feet had melted. The incident is called the Nedelin catastrophe after Mitrofan Ivanovich Nedelin, the head of the missile program, who died instantly. The R-16 rocket was developed by Mikhail Yangel, who survived and had to apologize to Khrushchev for doing so. The disaster was kept secret by the Soviets until 1989. Read the gory details of the worst space-related disaster ever at Amusing Planet. 

(Screenshot via YouTube. Not recommended.)

Everyone knows what bears do in the woods. They dance, of course! When bears emerge from their hibernation in the spring, they've shed most of the weight they put on last summer, but they still have their winter coat. As the temperatures rise, they feel their fur starting to get loose. It's an itch that must be scratched, and the best place to do it is against a tree with rough bark. So they all head to their favorite tree. The dancing in this video starts at about 1:45, and it's a downright sensuous experience. As they scratch their backs, the fur comes off, and so does that bear's scent. It's our job to add the music.

This clip, narrated by Sir David Attenborough, is from the BBC TV series Planet Earth II. The entire video is a feast for the eyes, as long as you aren't a marmot. -via Born in Space

Since the dawn of humanity, people have looked up into the night sky to see the stars. Observing them allowed us to learn how the universe works, how to mark time with calendars, and how to navigate around the world. But in our modern world, light pollution means that city dwellers never see stars, much less the further reaches of the Milky Way, and even in small towns it's hard to discern what's going on up there. If you want to see a meteor shower, for example, you have to drive long distances out into the wilderness. But even in the most remote places on earth, skies are brighter than they used to be. LED lights save energy, but that just means we use more of them and leave the lights on all night. And even if you find a remote dark area, the sky itself is full of satellites that get in the way of natural phenomena.   

Astronomers have coined a new word that describes the sadness one feels at the loss of stargazing opportunities: noctalgia. Read how this emotion came into being, and what it means at Space.com.  -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Brucewaters) 

In the US, you can give your baby pretty much any name you choose, but the very worst examples might draw the attention of Child Protective Services. In Australia, regulations prohibit certain types of names, and each is judged individually. The rule that gave me pause was a restriction against naming your child a title. In Kentucky, that would exclude a lot of Generals, Majors, Dukes, and Earls. But one rule is a restriction against a name "contrary to the public interest for some other reason." That's as ambiguous as you can get, and gives bureaucrats a lot of power over naming your child.

Kirsten Drysdale of the Australia Broadcasting Corporation decided to test the limits of the law by naming her child something pretty bad, but not specifically prohibited. Oh yeah, she really did. Let's see how that goes. This video does a good job of covering up the worst language, but it still has NSFW audio. It's Australian. -via reddit

Thousands of hunters have gone in search of a treasure that could be worth over $257,000. But after an accidental death (and a legal battle over the solutions), conspiracies swirl around the coveted statue: Does the golden owl even exist at all? https://t.co/aVxP2HBOr1

— Atlas Obscura (@atlasobscura) September 18, 2023

In 1993, marketing consultant Régis Hauser and artist Michel Becker launched a treasure hunt for a buried bronze owl. The person to find the owl would win its golden twin, an owl sculpted in gold and silver, encrusted with diamonds, worth around a quarter million dollars today. Becker created the owls, and Hauser designed the treasure hunt, which could be solved with eleven clues revealed in a book titled On the Trail of the Golden Owl. Hauser suspected that it would take a few months, a year at most, for someone to find it. Thirty years later, no one has.

But the story has many twists and turns. Along the way, the jewelry company the promotion was meant to promote dropped out and never even opened a store. The golden owl was seized in a bankruptcy case. Becker, the artist, managed to get it back when he found out years later. Then Hauser died suddenly in 2009. His heirs wanted nothing to do with the treasure hunt, and Becker didn't know where the owl was buried. He eventually got Hauser's files, but they weren't easy to decipher. Meanwhile, thousands of treasure hunters became very invested in the hunt. You can see a trail of lawsuits forming in this story. But that's just the bare overview! Read the full story of the hunt for the Golden Owl, the world's longest completely unsolved treasure hunt, at Atlas Obscura.

PS: The clues are online.

If you haven't seen Barbie yet (and there are a few of us), here's your chance to get an extended look and critique of the movie. Oh, and you won't want to miss the Quentin Tarantino part. Screen Junkies pronounces it a showcase of ad placement, not just for Barbie dolls and all their accessories, but also for Chevrolet and other consumer products. Plus, it's deeply feminist, implausible, and juvenile. But who cares about all that? The movie is really funny, which covers all other sins. But they find plenty of other good things to say about Barbie, so it's no wonder that the movie has made $1.4 billion already, the most of any 2023 movie so far.

Barbie will make another go-round at IMAX theaters for one week beginning Friday (September 22) and is already available for digital download, and will be released on home video on January 2.

The supernatural monster we call a vampire goes back hundreds of years, as reanimated corpses that rose from their graves to terrorize the living, almost the way we view zombies today. But through literature, they were turned into pop culture creatures who are cultured, sexy, and move among the living without being detected until it's too late. We often think of the 1897 novel Dracula as the beginning of that type of vampire, but there were others in literature before. The first aristocratic vampire was Lord Ruthven in the novel The Vampyre. The origin of this story is a story in itself.

There was that one night at a fine house on Lake Geneva in Switzerland in June of 1816 that a group of vacationers waited out a rainy night with a competition to see who could write the best ghost story. They included poet Lord Byron, poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley, Claire Clairmont, and Byron's physician 23-year-old John Polidori. Oh yeah, we already know what Mary Shelley wrote that night. But what about the other participants? They also wrote tales, or fragments of story ideas. Lord Byron came up with an idea that he never fleshed out, but it inspired Polidori to later write a novel about an attractive, cultured vampire. It was published in 1819, with Lord Byron listed as the author! Read what we know about the convoluted route that story went through to become The Vampyre at Mental Floss.

(Image credit: F.G. Gainsford)