If you ever think of Fanta, you probably picture orange soda. Or possibly grape. I think they also have a red one, but Fanta is usually orange. Except for this fall, when there's a black Fanta available for a limited time. The flavor is a mystery, and we may never find out exactly what it's supposed to taste like. My wild guess is that it will taste like some marginally nostalgic ultra-processed artificial fruit flavor. Fanta's parent company Coco-Cola has been doing this with various sodas for a year now. They encourage people to try it and share their guess at the taste on social media. In other words, free advertising. The only hint at these mystery flavors is that they are designed to "fool the senses," so a black beverage could easily taste like egg nog.

But the real selling point for What The Fanta Zero Sugar is that the company says it will turn your tongue black, so if you get some, you will want to put at least one back for the night of your Halloween costume party. Or take some to school to share for guaranteed hilarity. -via Mental Floss

(Image credit: Fanta) 

So are you a comic book reader? Have you ever been one? Marvel or DC? Evan Puschak explains why we tend to cleave to one or the other, for several reasons that make sense. Like Puschak, I started reading DC comics because of a Superman TV show, but in my case it was Adventures of Superman starring George Reeves, which I only saw in reruns. Comic books were 15 cents each, and I had to carefully budget my allowance to buy one. The rivalry between the two major comic producers is the same today, although the prices have gone up. I'm sure allowances have, too.

Puschak explains how comic publishers go through cycles of storytelling with their superhero characters, in order to boost readership and make money. Every once in a while, the cycle has escalated to a point where it has to stop and start over again, with a death, retirement, resurrection, or reboot, but that's fine because over the years another generation becomes old enough to read and enjoy comics. It's happened for around a hundred years. But does the cycle of a comic book superhero story translate to movies and TV? The Marvel Cinematic Universe has dozen of movies, and they follow the same sort of cycle seen in publishing. DC appears to be doing that, too, although with fewer films. Only time will tell if they know when it's the right time to slow down, take a break, and start over again. -via Kottke

We Earthlings will be able to see a new comet coming this way, all the way from the Oort Cloud at the outer reaches of our solar system. Comet Nishimura might be making its very first journey around the sun, and if it survives the trip, it won't be back for hundreds of years. The comet was first discovered by amateur astronomer Hideo Nishimura just last month. Since then, it has been getting brighter. The comet will reach its perihelion, the point where it is closest to the sun, on September 18. Considering its icy source and frozen composition, there's a good possibility that Comet Nishimura will break apart by then.

If you want to see Comet Nishimura, your best chance will be on Tuesday, September 12, at least in the northern hemisphere. Stargazers in the southern hemisphere may be able to track it longer, unless the comet disintegrates. Read more about Comet Nishmura and how to see it at Inverse.

(Image credit: Dan Bartlett via NASA)

While we tend to consider the 17th century as ancient history, the people of that time occasionally encountered even more ancient history. In 1653, a construction project in what is now Belgium unearthed a buried treasure of gold jewelry and other objects and human bones. Among them were 300 small bees made of gold, which may have been buttons of a sort. Archduke Leopold William took possession of the find, and enlisted his doctor to study them. Jean-Jacques Chifflet documented, illustrated, and identified the artifacts, and published a book about them. They were the possessions of King Childeric I (437 – 481 AD), the father of Clovis I who united the Frankish kingdoms and established the French monarchy. The workers on the construction site had stumbled upon his burial place.

That hoard of gold, including the 300 bees, had its own series of adventures after its excavation. It is the direct reason that Napoleon Bonaparte established the bee as his personal emblem. The collection was mostly destroyed after a heist, but thanks to Chifflet's efforts, we still know what it's all about. Read the chronicle of the golden bees at Just History Posts. -via Strange Company  

(Image credit: Unknown)

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KOTV Channel 6 news in Tulsa, Oklahoma, aired a human interest story about a June wedding in which a llama was a member of the wedding party. The animal, provided by Llama Adventures, looked very spiffy in his tuxedo and posed nicely for a full set of photographs. That will be a wedding to remember. 

The llama (named J) was funny enough, but the punch line came as the video clip ended and the chat commenced. His co-anchors could have brushed it off as a snarky remark, but they decided to throw him under the bus, and helpfully explained how a llama can stand up in a tuxedo. He's never going to live this down. -via reddit

Who would have guessed that U.S. Grant was a never-nude? It just goes to show that the psychological quirk is not a recent invention, it's just that we never heard of it before the internet. The US has seen 45 presidents (one served twice), and they all had parts of their lives that were private. Private parts that weren't covered by journalists, but were often exploited by rivals when the opportunity arose, and eventually made the history books. A trivia list about the weird private lives of some presidents is heavy on the rumored and confirmed adulterous affairs in presidential history (which isn't really all that odd), but also contains some fun facts that are just fun.

 
One has to wonder if the story may have been culturally nonsensical and the interpreter decided to smooth it over, or maybe the interpreter was just lazy. Not all presidents are covered, and some appear more than once. Some are stories you've heard over and over, and some are things you've never heard before. Read them all in a pictofacts list at Cracked.

In 2015, John Farrier introduced us to Holocaust hero Sir Nicholas Winton, who helped 669 Jewish children escape from Czechoslovakia in 1938, then went back home to Britain and never spoke of it. Even his wife didn't know until 1988 when she found his scrapbook. We got to see a very touching television appearance from that year revealing Winton's secret war efforts. That video serves as the framework for the trailer for One Life, a new feature film about Winton, starring Anthony Hopkins as the older Winton and Johnny Flynn as the younger Winton. Let's watch that clip from the BBC show That's Life again.  



The part the video clip does not show is that after the survivors stood up, the host asked if there's anyone in the audience who was the child or grandchild of a survivor, and the entire auditorium stood up. One Life will premiere at the Toronto Film Festival later this month, and will open in theaters in the US on January first.   

An 18th century pirate named Black Caesar is a legend around south Florida. There's a display at Biscayne National Park telling his story. No one knew his exact origins, whether he came from Africa or escaped from a plantation in the Caribbean or the southern US. Black Caesar would hide his ship among the islands in Biscayne Bay and wait for another ship to pass by before terrorizing and looting it. It was said that his buried treasure is still hidden somewhere in the bay. There was even an artifact in an iron ring affixed to a rock, where Black Caesar would tie his ship.

Is there any truth the the story at all? Pirates made no effort to document their crimes, but a good story about buried treasure can be a selling point for a parcel of land in Florida. A good yarn will bring tourists into a bar, a marina, or a national park. Maritime archaeologist Joshua Marano followed the legend of Black Caesar to get to the bottom of the stories, and ended up with a story about a story. Read what he found at Atlas Obscura.

The more recent history behind the founding of Biscayne National Park is a much better story. Sir Lancelot Jones almost single-handedly made sure that Biscayne Bay would be remain a natural green spot in the metropolis that Miami-Dade County came to be.

(Image credit: U.S. National Park Service)

Technology itself is neither good nor evil. We've seen again and again that it can be harnessed for the benefit of mankind, but is always used for someone to enrich themselves. How does that happen? On the one hand, modern technology has given us the surveillance state, geolocation, data harvesting, artificial intelligence, and social media. On the other hand, the world is full of people who will jump at the chance to give away everything that was once considered private for a new app that might be fun or will make your life slightly easier. People will even pay for the opportunity. And there are a bunch of folks who will part with their last dollar for the latest gadget if it has an apple on it. So what's next?

Introducing the Apple Eye, with a name that evokes the pleasant phrase "the apple of my eye," while looking and acting like nothing less than Big Brother's telescreens. It's the culmination of many invasive tech trends all in one device. Yeah, it's fictional ...for now. I'd bet when it really comes to market, it will be called the iApple. Or maybe iEye.  -via Geeks Are Sexy

When we use the term "Goody Two-Shoes" in everyday conversation, we are talking about someone who follows the rules to make themselves look good. But the original meaning of "Goody" was a shortened form of the title "Goodwife." In the 1765 novel The History of Little Goody Two-Shoes, the title character's name is Margery Meanwell, and got the nickname "Two-Shoes" when she was given a pair of shoes. She is an impoverished orphan who fights her way into a decent life by her own hard work and ambition. In other words, a progressive woman.

Over the course of the novel, Margery teaches herself to read, foils a major robbery, founds a school, earns her own living, stands up for animal rights and overcomes accusations of witchcraft. She was everything that 18th- and 19th-century British society thought women shouldn’t be: poor, well-educated, self-made and unmarried (at least until the last few pages).

Margery Meanwell was certainly "good," because she not only improved her lot but that of those around her. However, she did it by breaking the rules of social class and gender that were established at the time. The book was astoundingly popular among both boys and girls, and ushered in a whole new genre of literature- books aimed at child readers. Read up on The History of Little Goody Two-Shoes, the book -and the character- that started it all at Smithsonian.

Popocatépetl is an active volcano in Mexico. A webcam in Tianguismanalco, Puebla, is trained on it 24/7. Footage from that webcam taken on August 24 shows a fleet of spacecraft launching from the peak of the volcano in a line. Where are they going- back to the mothership or exoplanet where they came from? Or are they assembling to conquer earth? Maybe we should investigate the volcanic crater for the crystal skulls they may have left behind!

Or... the lines we see "coming out" of the volcano are passing Starlink satellites from SpaceX. The angle at which they are flying make it seem as if they are coming out of Popocatépetl's peak. Starlink, Elon Musk's global communications system, has more than 4,500 satellites in low earth orbit now, and there are plans to push that to 42,000 satellites eventually. That's scarier than the thought of UFOs in a volcano, because it's true.  -via Boing Boing  
   

If you want to encourage true diversity in wildlife, all you have to do is get rid of the people. We keep setting aside land for wildlife preserves, yet those areas are thick with people anyway- tourists who want to see wildlife, and who help pay for its upkeep. But in an area where people cannot go at all, nature truly takes over. When the Chernobyl nuclear plant melted down and exploded in 1986, the radiation cloud drifted north into what is now Belarus. Thousands of people were evacuated from villages and farms, and they never returned. While the Ukrainians have opened the region around Chernobyl for scientific study, the Polesie State Radioecological Reserve (PSRR) in Belarus is still off limits.

Without people around, the animals moved in. Boars, hares, beavers, deer, and more found freedom and relative safety in the PSRR. They don't know about radiation. And those prey animals were followed by predators. Wolves and lynx have moved in to take advantage of the deer and other wildlife. Even brown bears come through in the summer. These predators that normally hide in the woods are living in abandoned homes and farms, and stalking deer who graze in grasslands that used to be agricultural fields. We in the west are only now finding out about these animals reclaiming the land because of translation lag and the political fortunes of Belarus and other former Soviet nations. Read what we know of the diversity of wildlife in the PSRR at Atlas Obscura.

(Image credit: Jon Glittenberg)

The day after Labor Day, as if on cue, five houses on my street suddenly have their fall wreathes or other autumn decorations up. Including mine. It's also the perfect day for the Great Smoky Mountains National Park to launch their Fall Foliage Prediction Map. The map itself is all green right now, with just a bit of yellow along the Canadian border, but you can change the date with a slider. The image above is the map for the week of October 16. That might be the best time to schedule a drive through the Smokies, but wherever you go, there's a peak week for leaf-peeping.

The site also wants your feedback, with a survey that simply asks you to report the progress of fall foliage of your area today, and this year you'll have the ability to contribute current photographs of the colors you are experiencing in your neck of the woods. This data will help fine-tune next year's map. And there's a lesson in how and why leaves change color from their chlorophyll green to the bright autumn colors underneath produced by beta-carotene, anthocyanins, and flavonols. Plus you'll find a printable coloring book for the kids, and recipes for seasonal treats: pecan pie, moonshine apple pie, and pumpkin spice latte. Bookmark the Fall Foliage Prediction Map so you can plan a weekend getaway to a place that's going to be spectacular.     

The annual Bun Bang Fai Festival is celebrated in northeastern Thailand and in Laos in the run up to the rainy season. Its roots go back to earlier traditional festivals held to pray for abundant rain for the crops. The festival has all the usual stuff: parades, food, concerts, and political speeches, but the big draw centers around a competition of amateur rocketry. In the city of Ubon Ratchathan, the rocketry competition is hosted by professional rocket builder Niyom Butprom and his daughter Tarn. The rocket launches are judged by how high they fly, how long they stay up, and technical issues like a smooth launch and a soft landing. These rocket festivals are held at different dates in different towns, so you could travel to attend more than one every year. Great Big Story went to Ubon Ratchathan to see what this festival is all about. And as you might guess, a good time was had by all. -via Geeks Are Sexy 

You might recall the story of Ellen Sadler, the English girl who became famous for sleeping nine years straight. That was nothing compared to Sweden's Karolina Olsson, who went to bed and woke up 32 years later! Olsson didn't attend school until she was 14 years old, and within a month of beginning classes, she went to bed complaining of a tooth ache. That was in 1876. She stayed there, sleeping, for years without a medical consultation because her family couldn't afford to hire a doctor. The neighbors paid for a doctor visit in 1892, and soon medical specialists were coming to see her. Olsson was hospitalized for a month, but was discharged after she didn't respond to treatment.

Strangely, Olsson's appearance didn't change the way you would expect in a coma patient. Her mother tended to her needs, allegedly force-feeding her two glasses of milk every day for sustenance. Then in 1908, Olsson woke up, and seemed to have no lingering effects of her 32-year sleep, aside from being a 14-year-old in a 46-year-old woman's body. There is one telling fact, though. Olssen's mother died in 1905, and her daily care then fell to her father and the housekeeper. That's when she started losing weight, and was quite emaciated when she came to, echoing the experience of Ellen Sadler. Read the tale of Karolina Olsson at Amusing Planet.

(Image credit: Dagens Nyheter)