It happens every year, and it's always adorable. The 34th annual Tompkins Square Halloween Dog Parade was held on Sunday in New York City, and thousands of people came out to show off their dogs or enjoy watching the parade. The pooches were dressed to the nines, with imaginative costumes and vehicles, including the number one Halloween costume this year, Bob from Beetlejuice Beetlejuice. Dogs were dressed as historical figures, pop culture characters, other animals, and more than anything, food. Don't miss the puppy dressed as the house from Up!, the Target shopping cart, and the pair of werewolves. Dog owners were out in costume, as well. One couple dressed up as their dog, who wasn't wearing a costume, making it a trio. If you want to see the whole parade, it's available at YouTube. See more pictures in this article. These are all very good dogs.

Archaeologists have long studied remnants of ancient cities that arose and then were suddenly abandoned, which happened over and over before civilization got a real toehold. It appears to have happened every couple of thousand years. Çatalhöyük in Turkey is the oldest farming community yet discovered, dating back more than 9,000 years, where the houses were so densely packed that people entered through the roofs. It was abandoned fairly suddenly in 6,000 BCE. By 4,000 BCE, other cities grew up in what is now Ukraine, but were abandoned a thousand years later.

The layouts of these cities and others show that in each iteration, people became somewhat more distanced from their neighbors. Could these communities have been abandoned because of communicable diseases? Could they have been bad enough to give up city living for a millennium? Scientists have found DNA from some diseases, and are running simulations to test their hypothesis about city density and disease in shaping the beginning of civilization, and you can read about it at the Conversation. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: Murat Özsoy 1958)

We've all seen this illustration in movies and cartoons when a character has to make a moral decision- a small devil stands on one shoulder, and an angel on the other, whispering in the character's ear to persuade him to do the right thing or the wrong thing. The devil represents temptation, and the angel represents the conscience. It's pretty much the perfect way to illustrate a moral dilemma, but where did it come from? You won't be surprised to learn that the basic idea goes way back, at least a couple thousand years or so. But why are these figures small and standing on someone's shoulders? Duh, the easier to whisper in his ear, my dear. Everyone knows what it means, and it's certainly less boring than just using a disembodied voice to explain to the audience what the character is thinking. Which one will he listen to? Well, for that you will have to watch the movie.  -via Laughing Squid

New York Comic Con 2024 was held over this past weekend, and there were many awesome costumes that looked like they just walked off a movie set, or a spaceship, to be honest. However, I've always been drawn to cosplayers who show some imagination and cleverness. John Farrier was taken with a woman dressed as a Pizza Hut. My pick among those unexpected costumes is this guy who attended the con as a Muppeteer. He had the puppets, but which Muppet master would he dress as -Jim Henson or Frank Oz? Splitting his body down the middle, he didn't have to decide, and was able to carry two Muppets. You have to wonder if he did the voices, too. I tried to find out who this cosplayer is, but I have not found his name yet. This picture is just one among an astonishing gallery of 43 magnificent NYCC cosplay pictures posted at Buzzfeed.

Update: I heard from the cosplayer, and he is professional puppeteer Rick Lyon. You can find him on Instagram and at Facebook. -Thanks, Rick!

One way to get everyday people on board with a robot is to make it less like a human, and therefore less creepy. LimX Dynamics introduces the TRON 1, a bipedal robot that looks relatively unthreatening. It's only half the height of a human, and resembles robots we are familiar with from the movies (Tron, Star Wars, Robocop, Battlestar Galactica, etc.). All in all, it resembles an ostrich of sorts more than a human. For a two-legged robot, it balances really well, and has three different "foot" modes that can be switched out. And boy, can it dance!

You can have your own Tron I for just $15,000. I'm sure it can do things besides walk upstairs and dance, but what it's supposed to be useful for isn't really explained. I can't see it pushing a lawnmower or washing dishes. I'm sure it would be easy to attach a machine gun or a flamethrower to it. -via Boing Boing

What most people know about alchemy is that alchemists were looking for a magical way to convert lead or other common material into gold. They were also looking for a magical formula for immortality. This is a rather simplistic view of a discipline that changed and evolved over a thousand years' time.

In the beginning, alchemy was science, although rudimentary from our modern point of view. You could call it beginner's chemistry. Alchemists did experiments to learn the properties of materials and what could be done with them, although their theories were often derived from philosophy, religion, and a belief in what we would today call magic. Alchemists were mysterious, because those hoping to manufacture gold kept their activities private, and even with those who didn't, it was hard for anyone to understand what they were doing.

In the 16th century, there came to be a split between alchemy and pure science without the philosophy attached. Religion also moved on and considered alchemy to be heretical. But the alchemists made some pretty important discoveries while they were trying to manufacture gold. Read about alchemy and how it changed over time at Mental Floss.

(Image credit: Joseph Wright of Derby)

In the movies, pirates are charming scalawags who operate outside of the normal limits of civilization. This might give you the wrong idea about the Golden Age of Piracy in the mid-17th century. Sure, some governments turned a blind eye to certain pirates, as long as they carried out activities that benefitted some nations in their competition over other countries. Most pirates were just fine with deadly violence, whether in war or in plundering coastal villages or even in competition with each other. They could be pretty brutal overall. Captains reinforced the pecking order and kept their crews in line with the threat of a painful death, and rivals were treated even worse. Short of death, permanent maiming was on the table, too, which explains the hooks and peg legs. Those eyepatches had their uses, but they might have hidden a missing eye as well. Some pirates weren't above a bit of torture, either, to get what they wanted. Weird History relates some stories of pirates that might tarnish their cinematic reputation.

In the early 1950s, author Kurt Vonnegut was trying to get his writing career off the ground. His first book received favorable reviews, but the money wasn't coming in. With a family to support, he tried all kinds of jobs and ventures to bring in income. One he was particularly dedicated to was the development of a board game. It was a straightforward military strategy game called General Headquarters, and drew on his experience in World War II. But he never found a publisher that was interested.

Fast forward to the 21st century, and game designer Geoff Engelstein heard about the lost game and contacted Vonnegut's estate about it. He obtained 40 pages of Vonnegut's notes, rules, revisions, and rejection letters. From those, Engelstein put the game together and now it's available, 70 years after its inception, at Barnes & Noble. Read about General Headquarters at Open Culture. -via Nag on the Lake

Being a Russian historical figure is never a picnic, but Emperor Ivan VI had it worse than many. He was born in August of 1740, the son of a duke and duchess. His mother was the niece of the reigning Empress Anna, who had no children. At the age of two months, he was declared the heir to the throne just before Anna died. A year later, the toddler Emperor Ivan VI was overthrown by his cousin Elizabeth Petrovna, and he and his parents were imprisoned. At age four, he was separated from this parents and put into solitary confinement and the public was led to believe he was dead. While his guards were kept in the dark as to their prisoner's true identity, Ivan was taught to read only so he could read the Bible, and was otherwise left alone. He grew to be mentally ill due to years of isolation, and weak from the lack of any medical attention during his confinement. However, Ivan knew who he was, and eventually some of the guards knew, too.

When Catherine the Great ascended to the throne in 1762, she issued secret orders that the "nameless one" was to be put to death if anyone ever tried to take him out of his prison. And that's exactly what happened in 1764, just before Ivan's 24th birthday. Read about the hapless emperor at Wikipedia with more commentary at reddit.  -via Messy Nessy Chic

(Image credit: Ivan Ivanovich Tvorozhnikov)

During harvest season, we love to see videos of zoo animals having fun playing with and eating pumpkins. At the Oregon Zoo, they have the annual "Squishing of the Squash" event for the elephants (see several previous videos of that) Now we get to see the rhinos do it!

The Oregon Zoo's black rhinos showed us what those horns are good for -they are tools, used to open up a pumpkin by goring or even slicing it. They are also pretty good for tossing things or even carrying them around. You may call these magnificent beast rhinos, rhinoceros, tank puppies, or unicorns. Oh, yeah, the elephants have already had their Squishing of the Squash this year, too.



The pumpkins are donated by local farmers with extra pumpkins and hobbyists who grow giant pumpkins for the fun of it. The zoo animals have enjoyed a lot of prize winners in the past! A good time was had by all. -via Laughing Squid

On September 2-3, 1935, the first recorded category 5 hurricane swept through southern Florida. Storms were yet to be given names, so it became known as the Labor Day hurricane. Ernest Hemingway lived in Key West at the time, and the damage on that island was relatively minor, although it was cut off from the mainland when the hurricane wrecked the railroad bridge. Nearby Upper Matecumbe Key and Lower Matecumbe Key were flattened, with all buildings and most vegetation stripped away. Hemingway wrote about the destruction, particularly the 400 people who died in the keys.

Many of the dead were World War I veterans, employed by the federal government to work on highway construction. Hemingway was incensed that despite several days warning, these men were not evacuated to the mainland, but were left in their ramshackle dormitories. Their bodies were not taken away for days. The scene reminded Hemingway of the mass deaths he had seen on the battlefields of the Great War. Read how Ernest Hemingway reported the carnage and his anger at the Conversation.

The Soviets were really big on proving they were the best at everything, whether it was science, nuclear weapons, the space race, or Olympic competition. That probably had something to do with why they decided to dig the deepest manmade hole on earth. Oh, there were plenty of scientific research reasons, but the expense involved leads us to believe it was mainly another superlative they could brag about.  

The Kola Superdeep Borehole is more than seven miles deep, or 12,262 meters, to be exact. The Soviets kept digging for 19 years, from 1970 to 1989. You may think, well, there's your answer for why they stopped digging, because the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 after a couple of years of really tense internal struggles. But the project had other problems, too, that had to do with the earth and what's going on seven miles down there. Half as Interesting explains the project in a little over seven minutes; the rest of the video is an ad.  -via Digg

The German military developed the first weapons of mass destruction during World War I when they unleashed poison gas on the Allies, mostly chlorine and bromine, which are heavier than air and combine to form toxic acid. The Allies then developed their own chemical weapons and gas masks for defense. But the underfunded Russian army had no gas masks. In 1915, when the Germans attacked a Russian unit at Osowiec Fortress, which is in what is now Poland, the Russians had no defense. They did the best they could, soaking rags and bandages in their own urine and wrapping them around their faces. But the deadly gas caused them to cough up blood. What was amazing is that these men fought on. Thought to be already dead, they leapt from their bunkers wrapped up like mummies covered in blood. The Germans saw them as ghosts or zombies and fled in terror. That battle at Osowiec Fortress became known as the Attack of the Dead Men.  

The story is often told as a horror tale by painting a picture of the dying Russians scaring the wits out of the German army, but the bigger horror story is the advent of chemical weapons. Read more about the use of poison gas during World War I at Creative History. -via Strange Company

(Image credit: Library of Congress)

Taco Bell has built quite a large business on the premise of combining the same five ingredients into a wide variety of food items in different shapes and sizes, with a wide price range. Staying open through the wee hours helped a lot, too. They've not been as successful with their quirky advertising campaigns, though. The biggest and most memorable was the Taco Bell chihuahua that was everywhere in the late 1990s. The dog was cute, the scenarios were funny, and you saw those ads every time you turned a TV on. The chihuahua image was made into plush dolls and graced t-shirts. Then suddenly, the ads with the chihuahua were gone, and no one really noticed because, well, it was advertising after all. Weird History Food explains where the chihuahua came from, how he (or actually, she) became a sensation, and why the dog disappeared so quickly. Spoiler: no, it wasn't because the dog died.

Last month, we marveled at the video winners of the Small World in Motion competition, and today the winners of the Nikon Small World Photomicrography competition have been announced for 2024. The image above, by Dr. Bruno Cisterna and Dr. Eric Vitriol of the Department of Neuroscience and Regenerative Medicine at the Medical College of Georgia at Augusta University, won first place. It shows differentiated mouse brain tumor cells magnified 100 times. Dr. Cisterna is leading a team studying how disruptions in the brain structures known as microtubules can lead to neurodegenerative disease like Alzheimer's and ALS. He spent three months perfecting the staining process so that the images they worked with would clearly show the brain structures.    

 

The competition began in 1975, which means this year is the 50th edition of the photomicrography awards. Dr. Marcel Clemens came in second for an image of an electrical arc between a pin and a wire at 10,000 volts. The third place image, shown above, was captured by Chris Romaine. It is a cannabis plant magnified 20 times, showing its trichomes and cannabinoid vesicles. You can see the top twenty winners in this gallery. Also see the honorable mentions and images of distinction. Who knew that slime molds, disease cells, pregnant fleas, pollen, and intestines could be so beautiful!