With move-in day right around the corner, overpasses all over the Boston area need your help. They need to not be hit by a moving truck on Storrow Drive or Soldiers Field in Boston & Memorial Drive in Cambridge. Plan your move in day route accordingly & watch for the signs! pic.twitter.com/Wkfgcg6Nx3

— MassDCR (@MassDCR) August 23, 2023

We've gotten used to the many accidents at the infamous 11 foot 8 bridge in Durham, North Carolina, even after it was raised a few inches. But it's far from the only can opener bridge in the US, and sometimes these accidents are seasonal. Boston is America's biggest college town. Every August, culminating on Labor Day weekend, thousands of new students move into apartments and dormitories, often bringing their stuff in rental trucks that may be taller than they are aware of.   

In Boston, many of those trucks find themselves on Storrow Drive, a main thoroughfare that has several low-clearance bridges. Trucks and busses are prohibited on Storrow Drive for just this reason, but people coming in from out-of-town for the first time do not realize that until it's too late. Trucks hitting bridges here is quite common, and this phenomena has led to its own term: Storrowing. Could it be that bad? I searched for "Storrow Drive Bridge" on YouTube and got a long list of incidences.



Storrow Drive is not the only road in Boston that has low bridges. You can see why the Massachusetts Department of Conservation & Recreation felt the need to put out public service announcements to warn people traveling to the city. -via Metafilter

If you are a fan of Syfy's extreme disaster movies, you might assume that sharks use the energy of ocean storms to launch themselves at people, all the better to eat them. But Sharknado was fiction, hurricanes are real, and there are dozen of species of sharks living in the ocean. How do they cope with hurricanes?

Sharks normally congregate in shallow waters near the shore where it's warmer and there are plenty of fish to eat. But when a major storm is coming -and they can tell- sharks use the same two strategies humans use: they either evacuate or they hunker down and ride it out. The difference in these decisions seems to depend on the size of the shark. Smaller shark species and juveniles not fully grown tend to head to deeper water, where they stay until several days after the storm has passed. Large sharks tend to stay put, and almost always come out fine on the other end. Maybe they've seen plenty of storms in their lives, and aren't nearly as frightened, just like some older folks on land. But really, it's more likely instinct. Read about sharks and hurricanes, with no disasters involved, at Vox. -via Damn Interesting

There are an awful lot of scientific names that end up seeming like they were coined by 12-year-old boys. Really, you could make a list like this in any of the many scientific disciplines, because some scientists are actually 12-year-old boys at heart. But some really rude-sounding chemical names are caused by translations from other languages, our tendency to mispronounce the spelling we see, or an unfortunate clash between a real person's name and chemical suffixes. I have no idea why someone, somewhere, chose the brand name Fartox.



The examples I've brought here are honestly tame compared to some of them. I have researched this very subject in the distant past, and some of these are new to me. Since then, either new chemicals have been named, or rude modern slang has made old chemical names much funnier.  



Incidentally, it's pronounced "FYOO-sit-all." But we've seen the fake medicine meme with a very similar name, so that's not the first pronunciation to pop into our heads. You can see 15 rude, crude, and socially unacceptable chemicals and the stories behind their names (when they are known) at Cracked.  

When it's time to get up, you better get up and going. The Human Car Wash will make sure you are awake and have your morning coffee even before you get out of bed! If that sounds pleasant, divest yourself of that idea, because this chain reaction gadget gets you out of bed by making your desire to sleep in just too hazardous to risk. It's the latest convoluted nonsense from Joseph Herscher of Joseph's Machines (previously at Neatorama). We don't know how many times he was injured getting this sequence to work- you'll have to join Patreon to see that. Herscher then gets scrubbed clean and dressed in a sequence that's not strictly a chain reaction, but is tripped just by walking through, like going through a car wash. That part is SFW because he keeps his Valentine undershorts on. It all happens in just two minutes. -via Geeks are Sexy

The Philippines became self-governing in 1935, but their former colonizer the United States didn't recognize that until 1946. After World War II, the nations remained allies, but a communist insurgent group called Hukbong Bayan Laban sa Hapon, or Hukbalahap (Huk for short), who formed to fight the Japanese, fought for control of the Philippines.  

The Americans appointed Lieutenant Colonel Edward Lansdale of the CIA to conduct operations against the Huks, which included psychological warfare. Lansdalen was charged with clearing one area of Huks in order to protect withdrawing American troops and their sympathizers, so he leveraged the legend of the aswang, a shapeshifting, human-animal hybrid vampire. This involved seeding the area with rumors of a curse and the threat of a vampire attack to come. The operation culminated in a staged vampire attack, complete with puncture holes in the victim's neck! Read how they pulled that off, and what happened afterward, at Mental Floss.       

(Image credit: Scary Side of Earth)

We love our dogs and cats, and we want to save the tiger, but the world is full of strange and weird creatures we should know more about. First up, the maned wolf, which isn't a wolf, and looks like a fox on horse legs, and it eats mostly vegetables! That's just the beginning of an entertaining introduction to some strange creatures from Mamadou Ndiaye. That's the internet zoologist Mamadou Ndiaye, not the basketball player Mamadou Ndiaye, or the other basketball player Mamadou Ndiaye. It's a pretty common name.  

Anyway, this video tells us what we really want to know about raccoon dogs, fossas, bush dogs, and the cookie cutter shark (which is both tiny and terrifying). Be sure to stay with this long enough to hear what the clouded leopard says, since it can't purr like small cats and can't roar like big cats. It's more of a whiny meow, which you wouldn't expect to hear in the rainforest. -via Boing Boing

The La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles is a treasure trove of information about prehistoric California. Thousands of animals over time were trapped and then preserved in the pits, seemingly for us to study, but so far only one human has been found. Scientists are able to date these remains of extinct species by carbon dating. And they can date the tar itself by its layers of pollen and charcoal trapped as the tar solidified.

The lack of human remains doesn't mean people weren't there- they just learned to avoid the tar. Evidence of humans shows that they were indeed in southern California, with a steep rise in population around 13,200 years ago. That's when the charcoal layers became more frequent in the timeline, suggesting that human campfires got out of control, or else they purposefully set wildfires to chase animals out for the hunt. Then about 12,900 years ago, many large mammal species suddenly vanished from the fossil record. Could they have been driven out, or driven extinct, by human-caused wildfires? The area was suffering from drought already, which would have both weakened the animals and made the forests more susceptible to fire. Just as Southern California suffers from drought affecting a huge population of humans today.   -via Strange Company

(Image credit: Cullen Townsend, Natural History Museum)

Jellyfish are ancient creatures that have no brain, are almost all water, and many of them are transparent -often beautifully so. You'd think such an animal would be harmless, but no. They sting, and even worse, they multiply like crazy. Out-of-control jellyfish blooms are becoming more and more of a problem. In nature, that's usually because something else is out of balance. In this case, it's because the jelly's natural predator is suffering from declining populations. That's the sea turtle. There's a reason that it's illegal to disturb sea turtle nests or hatchlings. They suffer enough from trash in the ocean. Mariela Pajuelo and Javier Antonio Quinones put together this TED-Ed lesson to warn us about the importance of the leatherback sea turtles who are not afraid to swim with the jellies. They are keeping the oceans from turning into a morass of jellyfish goo.

Empress Elisabeth of Austria is having a moment, thanks to the Netflix series The Empress. Elisabeth, nicknamed Sisi, married her first cousin Emperor Franz Joseph I in 1854 at age 16. Sisi was a beautiful woman, and was painted and photographed in many fabulous dresses, with one exception- no one knew what her wedding dress looked like. There were no illustrators, photographers, or journalists allowed into the wedding ceremony, and the dress itself disappeared (the dress in the picture above is from her coronation as Queen of Hungary). Therefore, the empress's wedding dress has been a mystery for almost 200 years, without even an eyewitness description. The only clue is a sumptuous train that is believed to have been attached to Sisi's wedding dress.

(Image credit: Prof. Mortel)

That train is in the Imperial Carriage Museum in Vienna. Dr. Monica Kurzel-Runtscheiner, the museum's director, has been on a quest for years to uncover any clues as to the imperial wedding dress, with little luck until 2021. That's when an obscure portrait of Sisi was discovered in a Czech museum, wearing a dress with the exact train displayed in Vienna! The portrait was painted three years after the wedding, by an artist who wasn't officially associated with the royal family. How did that happen, when Sisi had gone to such lengths to keep the dress a secret? It's possible that three years later, she had second thoughts about archiving the look before destroying the dress, or maybe she was proud of still being able to fit into it after giving birth to two children, and possibly already pregnant with her third.

Dr. Kurzel-Runtscheiner spent months studying the painting, and then went to great lengths to actually recreate the dress, which is now displayed alongside the portrait in an exhibit at the Carriage Museum until November 5th. See the portrait and the replica dress alongside the story at Atlas Obscura.

There has been plenty of speculative fiction about artificial intelligence taking over the world and eliminating superfluous humans, whether by design or by accident, by messing with our national defense systems, infrastructure, or governments. But it's possible that the first deaths from AI might come from a place we'd never think of, harnessed by the very human desire to make a quick buck. The New York Mycological Society is warning the public about a rash of AI-generated books on mushroom foraging. What could possibly go wrong?

Searching for edible mushrooms in the wild is a growing hobby, one that should always be guided by experts in the field. There are poisonous mushrooms that resemble edible varieties, and it takes knowledge and experience to detect the difference. Samantha Cole's search of mushroom-foraging guides on Amazon revealed quite a few, some aimed at beginners, that were written by authors with no internet presence and no authentic credentials. She ran text samples through AI-detection programs that revealed they were likely written by ChatGPT (and some samples are easily detectible to anyone who writes a lot). To their credit, Amazon removed the books they were alerted about, but how many more are there?

In the age of self-publishing and on-demand printing, it's easier than ever to get a book listed for sale on Amazon. With ChatGPT, one can even skip the process of writing and editing it. The subject of mushroom-foraging might be just the first phase of dangerous AI publishing we will have to deal with. Read about the AI-generated mushroom guides at 404. -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Camerist)

In the spots where the World Trade Center towers once stood, there is now a memorial to those we lost on September 11, 2001. It includes a museum and two massive pools of water below ground level, about an acre each, with waterfalls all around. The names of 2,983 victims from both 9/11 and from the 1993 WTC bombing are inscribed on parapets surrounding the pools. When the memorial closes at 8PM a dedicated crew gets to work maintaining it. This means cleaning the pools, which collect leaves, dirt, and debris every day, including some trash. They also brush up the algae and filter the water. The bronze plates with the inscribed names are also cleaned, and sometimes they have to repair acts of vandalism. The crew takes their work quite seriously, to make sure this sacred space is pristine when more visitors begin to arrive every morning at eight.

The National September 11 Memorial & Museum will hold special events for the 22nd anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. The schedule is here. -via Laughing Squid

Bored Panda posted a gallery of bad tattoos, taken from the subreddit shittytattoos. Most of them are very bad, in both taste and execution (and some are NSFW), but there are a couple that I find just plain cute. For example, redditor ClearAboveVis10SM showed us his tattoo that was drawn by his wife. She doesn't pretend to be an artist, but she drew this camel for him and he loves her, and now he has a permanent reminder of her efforts to take with him. I find that sweet.

 
Redditor firefisch actually likes this tattoo, but posted it at the subreddit anyway. This small, simple cat hints at a story behind it, and has a goofy face that's cartoony enough to get away with. I like it.

Redditor watrdog's brother did this tat. It's not highly artistic, but for a ghost it's totally non-threatening and downright cute. There may be a couple of other tattoos in the list that aren't horrible, but the vast majority of them are disasters. See 50 of them at Bored Panda.

Apologies for the headline, but you cannot approach the Octopus Garden without the Beatles song playing in your head. This garden is two miles deep at Davidson Seamount, an area in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of California. It's a popular nesting ground for the pearl octopus (Muusoctopus robustus), and may contain as many as 20,000 octopuses and their eggs. The Octopus Garden is the largest octopus nesting area ever discovered. It was first noticed in 2018, but with new technology, the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) has gotten an up close look.

Why do octopuses come here to nest? The garden is among the remains of an extinct volcano, where there are thermal vents that warm the water. At that depth, you would expect water temperatures to hover around 35°F (1.6°C), but those thermal vents bring the surrounding water up to 51°F (11°C). The warmer water causes octopus eggs to mature much faster, which shockingly takes years anyway. MBARI has much more on these octopuses at their website. -via Metafilter

When Joseph Smith, the founder of the Mormon faith, died in 1844, his successor Brigham Young took most of Smith's followers to Utah territory. But not all of them. Others were led by James Jesse Strang, who dreamed of a community for his followers. Responding to orders from an angel that appeared to him, he took those followers to Beaver Island, Michigan. They quickly built roads, farms, schools, and businesses, and established a government with Strang as its head. He even declared himself king! Within a few years, almost all the non-Mormon residents of Beaver Island had left.

Strang enacted some questionable practices, like public punishment for transgressors, and polygamy, which he had earlier rejected. He had both supporters and enemies, which makes tracking down the truth about him difficult. A reputation for piracy grew up around the island, and it was said that Beaver Island residents were eager to rob any passing ship. Others say that was blown out of proportion. Strang was also said to have poached wives from other men. He was eventually killed in 1856 by two of his own followers, and his home was burned to the ground. Almost 200 years later, people still can't agree on whether Strang was an upstanding founding father of the community or a deranged cult leader. Read of the rise and fall of King Strang at Atlas Obscura.

In the 1960s, Clint Eastwood made a name for himself starring in a trilogy of Westerns directed by Italian filmmaker Sergio Leone. These "spaghetti Westerns" were filmed in Spain. For the third film, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, a huge cemetery was built in the Castilla y León region out in the country, five kilometers from the nearest village. The Spanish military created more than 5,000 fake graves with markers or crosses for the film's climax, which takes place at Sad Hill Cemetery. After filming, the crew left the cemetery as it was and never returned. The set was forgotten and was reclaimed by nature.

But in 2015, a group called the Sad Hill Cultural Association went on a quest to find Sad Hill Cemetery. It wasn't easy, and when they located the cemetery, restoring it to its 1966 appearance was also a chore. Spanish filmmaker Guillermo de Oliveira heard about the project, and made a documentary about finding and renovating Sad Hill, and included interviews with everyone from the locals who worked as extras to Clint Eastwood himself. The restored cemetery is now in the Spanish heritage register, and it's a tourist attraction. Read the story of Sad Hill Cemetery at Amusing Planet.

(Image credit: Mijnmedia)