The Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) regularly shows us amazing creatures from the deepest depths of the ocean. This one is Bathydevius caudactylus, a newly named species that they've been studying for 24 years. Until recently, they called it the "mystery mollusk" because they didn't know exactly what kind of creature it is. It has a transparent hood like a jellyfish, tentacles like a squid, and a foot like a sea snail. Yet it acts like none of those other types of animals, and lives in the bathypelagic zone, 1,000 to 4,000 meters (3,300 to 13,100 feet) under the surface, where sunshine cannot reach. Yes, Bathydevius caudactylus is bioluminescent, but at this depth, that doesn't indicate what other species it may be related to. There have been more than 150 sightings in those years, and finally a specimen was brought up to study and underwent a DNA analysis. Reach more about the new species at MBARI's website. -via TYWKIWDBI

Sixty-five years ago today, prison parolees Perry Edward Smith and Richard Eugene Hickock went to the Kansas home of farmer Herbert Clutter and murdered him, his wife Bonnie, and their two teenage children. Each of the victims were tied up and shot in the head. If the crime sounds familiar to you, it's most likely due to the book that Truman Capote wrote a few years later titled In Cold Blood, or the movie made from it in 1967. Capote wrote it as what he called a "nonfiction novel," or a true story told in dramatic style using literary storytelling techniques. It became a bestseller, and was foundational in establishing the literary genre of true crime novels. Capote did painstaking research into the crime, but was criticized later on for embellishing some of the facts.

What happened that day in Holcomb, Kansas, was horrifying enough, and scarred the community permanently. Read an account of the murders of the Clutter family on November 15th, 1959, at Smithsonian.

A surveillance video shows a bear rummaging around inside of a 2010 Rolls Royce Ghost in Southern California in January. The video was submitted to the car insurance company as evidence of the extensive damage, but investigators were suspicious and turned to a wildlife biologist for help. What appears to be a brown bear, a species that doesn't live in Southern California, was actually a man in a bear costume. The insurance company also found bear damage claims for two other cars with two other insurance companies on the same date at the same location. And strangely, no one in the neighborhood was aware of any bears spotted in January, which would have been shared. Four men were arrested Wednesday for insurance fraud. A bear costume, pictured above, was found at a suspect's home. The weird scheme could have been a Scooby-Doo plot, and you have to wonder why the Rolls Royce owner didn't just try to sell the car instead of ruining it. -via Metafilter

(Image source: CA Dept of Insurance)

An account from 1560 tells the story of Marguerite Walezer of Vienna, who had what she thought was a normal pregnancy in the year 1545. During her long labor, the fetus stopped moving and she knew the baby had died. But the labor pains stopped and the midwives couldn't make her deliver. Doctors couldn't help her, either. Surely her body would expel the stillbirth eventually, right? But that didn't happen, and Walezer suffered pains until November of 1550, when she convinced a surgeon to cut her open and relieve her of the fetus. At the time, alcohol and opium were the only surgical anesthetics, so it must have been a horrific experience. But after the surgery, Walezer was said to have been the picture of health.

Could this story possibly be true? The account is nestled in a book full of fantastic tales, but stands out because it comes with names and dates. Dr. Irvine Loudon published a paper in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine that explains the rare but plausible medical circumstances that may have led to Walezer's five year pregnancy, including the surgery that ended it. You can read a shorter recap at Weird Universe.

(Image source: Wellcome Images)

A video this dense with information makes me all the more respectful of public health scientists. We fight all kinds of different viruses, and each has their own story. Today we learn how many different types of polio virus there are. There's the wild virus, which has three main variants. And then each of those variants can be a wild virus, deactivated virus, attenuated virus, or a mutant virus. We use some of these to fight the others.

Before we had vaccines, polio was super virulent because most infected people weren't even aware they had the virus, so they constantly spread it to others who might not be so lucky. A small fraction of the infected got sick, and were in danger of dying or becoming permanently disabled. The only real solution is to vaccinate the entire population and wipe polio viruses from the face of the earth, like we did with smallpox.

Thanksgiving is only two weeks away. Do you have the movies picked out for your Thanksgiving family film festival? Yeah, that's not really a thing, like it is for Halloween and for Christmas. Up until 1987, there was only one Thanksgiving movie, and it was Alice's Restaurant. Then there was Plane, Trains, and Automobiles. If you wanted, Miracle on 34th Street would do, even though most of it is about Christmas. But if you expand your definition of a Thanksgiving movie a little, there are a lot more. Does it have a memorable Thanksgiving scene in it? Does it happen on Thanksgiving Day? Then it's a Thanksgiving movie! You can pick and choose from uplifting family fare, rom-coms, horror movies, comedies, animation, and gripping dramas. Mental Floss found 18 movies that you might consider watching for Thanksgiving, with a description and trailer or video clip for each. And it doesn't even include Alice's Restaurant.

This little octopus wants to go places! A young boy is hijacked by the totally adorable sea creature while on vacation, and ends up taking him home. The octopus loves seeing and learning about the new things in the city, but he loves Christmas more than anything. There is no dialogue, yet it's obvious that the boy and the octopus communicate with each other. I won't tell you how it ends, but the piece of paper you see at 3:04 explains. I had to back the video up to take another look at it.

This holiday short is from Disney, which explains the constant reference to other Disney products, from the music to the various toys to the movie they watch together. The Boy and The Octopus was directed by Taika Waititi. I wouldn't be surprised to learn this is a test to gauge the character's appeal for possible future projects. -via (appropriately) Laughing Squid

Have you ever heard a radio announcer say, "That was (song) from the movie (title)," and you thought, "Wow, I've always loved that song, but I never knew it was from a movie." It may well have been from a movie you never saw or never even heard of because it wasn't all that great. Plenty of film productions commission songs specifically for the film, and even more find appropriate but unreleased songs to use that are then released in conjunction with the film. That leaves us with a lot of songs that became hits from movies that flopped so badly we don't even remember them -or maybe the film is just too old.  

Back in 2014, you couldn't escape the Pharrell song "Happy." It was the biggest song of the year, won two Grammys, and we posted about it quite a bit. Yet few people recall that is was written for the 2013 movie Despicable Me 2. The movie was honestly a hit, but it was aimed at children. Even more obscure is the origin of the song "Unchained Melody," which was a big hit for the Righteous Brothers in 1965 and you might associate it with the 1990 film Ghost. However, it was written for the 1955 prison movie Unchained, and that's how it got its title.

Some of your favorite songs may have been spawned by a movie you've never seen. Read up on 21 of those songs, with videos, at Cracked.

All aboard the Quarantrain! A large setup of miniature trains in a realistic setting is always a treat, and you have to admire the craftsmanship and dedication of those who make them. Jim Merullo did that with some extra goodies during the pandemic lockdown. He upgraded a previously-abandoned HO scale train layout with scenes that bring us all in on the joke. The first scene he made for what he calls the Quarantrain was a recreation of a classic Gary Larson Far Side comic. Making a standing cow was not easy- he had to combine parts of four cows to get it right. Another scene that caught my eye is an illustration of the Trolley Problem.

Will the switch operator do nothing and kill half a dozen children, or divert the train and kill a nun? See more of these unique scenes from the Quarantrain at Merullo's website. He also posted a thread at Bluesky explaining how he constructed the Quarantrain.  -via Everlasting Blort

Screen Junkies took the opening of the movie Wicked this week as an excuse to go back and do an Honest Trailer for a movie made in 1939. They don't have to explain The Wizard of Oz to us because we've all seen us (or should have by now), and there's not much they can criticize about the filmmaking. However, they reframe the absurd story through a modern eye to be about a young girl with a serious concussion who accomplishes her mission through murder, theft, and consorting with strange men.    

By the way, Wicked is another of the many recent movies that explore the tragic early life and motivations of an existing movie villain to make them appear sympathetic and allow us to feel better about liking them. See also: Maleficent, Joker, The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, Cruella, Minions: The Rise of Gru, and the Star Wars prequels.

(Image source: daddyisproudofme) 

Cats, like most animals, have developed camouflage appearances so that they blend into the background in their natural habitat. But they can also blend into the background in manmade spaces, like the kitchen cabinets, so they can hide and spy on their humans. Have you found the cat in the image above yet? It took me an embarrassing amount of time to see it, but now I can't un-see it. But that's just the beginning. In the picture below, you can easily see three cats. But there are four.

(Image credit: No_Internal9345)

The subreddit Find the Sniper is full of these kinds of puzzles -and they're not all cats. Bored Panda selected 30 very hard ones for a ranked list that may drive you insane. I believe finding the owl was the hardest. There are answers in the comments, but if you want to find the hidden thing on your own, you can click the credit under each photo and go the the original reddit post, where you can enlarge the picture greatly. If you try more than a couple, it will suck up hours of your time.   

If you had a real working time machine, the temptation to use it as much as you could would be overwhelming, even when it doesn't make sense. Would you get stuck on trying to make everything perfect, just for the excuse to go back and forth? Doc's become a little obsessed, to the point where you might want to take his keys away and make him remain in one timeline for a while. Why make the 1985 Marty always save the day when you could just ask 2015 Marty to do the same? Or maybe even take care of the problem yourself. Maybe this is why Doc eventually decided to stay in the 19th century in the third film. No, right, that was for love. Studio C did a good job of recreating the characters of Back to the Future 2 in order to explore the absurdities of what that kind of power can do to someone.

Prolific science fiction author Harlan Ellison wrote two episodes of the TV series The Outer Limits, "Soldier" and "Demon with a Glass Head." They both ran during the show's second season in 1964. In 1984, Ellison heard that James Cameron was working on a film that seemed quite similar to the plot of "Soldier," which you can watch in full. Hemdale Productions wouldn't let him see the script. When he saw The Terminator, Ellison was ready to sue.

The lawsuit never came about, because Hemdale Productions settled the case, for money, screen credit in subsequent releases of the film, and a gag order. To this day, people argue over whether The Terminator was at all plagiarized and if so, how much. Read what Ellison had to say about the case at the time and the reaction from James Cameron at Den of Geek. You've probably already seen The Terminator, and it's up to you to watch The Outer Limits episode if you want to form your own opinion.  

There's no doubt that Mario is king of the video game universe. His many adventures take him to strange places, the latest of which is the Overlook Hotel from the 1980 Stanley Kubrick movie The Shining. This isn't just another castle; it's the setting for weird and creepy hallucinations brought on by isolation. The tricycle is there, as are the twins, the blood flood, and room 237's bathroom. How many other callbacks from The Shining can you spot? There are a lot crammed into this 90-second video, so you'll have to watch this CGI mashup from Mark Cannataro Films more than once to catch all the references. Other characters from the Mario universe take on familiar and frightening roles roles from the horror film, some of them infinitely appropriate; others absurdly contrary. All in all, it's an absurd mashup that is sure to give you a smile. -via Geeks Are Sexy

This is the time of year we think about overindulging on rich and elaborate foods. We also open our doors to family and friends to celebrate winter holidays. That's why you've always wanted to impress them with a delicious home made cheese cake. There are plenty of classic recipes on the internet that involve cream cheese, sugar, eggs, and flavoring, but the process is rather delicate. If you've tried before and had a less-then-perfect result, The Takeout will troubleshoot for you with the 12 most common mistakes in baking cheesecake. If you've never made a cheesecake before, so many possible mistakes may intimidate you. Relax, I've made cheesecake a few times and it's not as difficult as you might be led to believe. Even when it isn't perfect, it's still cheesecake, and that's a wonderful thing.

But if you have perfected the art of baking a cheesecake, you might want to take it up a notch and make Japanese cheesecake, which is the light and airy soufflé version. The Takeout has you covered with instructions for that, too. Now you'll be ready to really impress your holiday guests.   

(Image credit: Alice Wiegand)