The sea holds untold mysteries and legends of monsters from as far back as people have gone to sea. Most of the many sea monster sightings have been explained by drunk and disoriented sailors, and sea monsters that wash up on shore are usually known animals that have been partially eaten or have decayed. But people know what a squid is, because the smaller ones are quite familiar. In 1873, one that was mistaken for a shipwreck grabbed a fishing boat, but was fought off. But later evidence of giant squids was limited to dead specimens and body parts. Giant squids can be 40 feet long! We knew they were there, so why did it take until 2004 to find one alive? Maybe they are hiding from us. The Kraken is smarter than we thought. And that's just the giant squid- we still haven't seen a live colossal squid!  -via Geeks Are Sexy

When a pope dies, the cardinals of the Catholic Church meet at the Vatican to elect a new pope, a meeting called the papal conclave. In the 16th and 17th centuries, this process was critical for most of Europe, because the pope was a political as well as a religious figure. The cardinals were locked in, windows were covered, servants were dismissed, and all food delivered was thoroughly inspected to prevent anyone from sending messages. The food was meager anyway, and the bunks were hard, in order to hurry the process along.

Why such a hurry? Because when there was no pope and the cardinals were absent, order broke down in the streets of Rome. Courts were canceled, the jails were opened, and citizens let loose with their anger toward the deceased pope. Bankers ceased working and laid bets on who the new pope would be. The city's Jewish population bore the brunt of the lawlessness. The mayhem was a great argument for the separation of church and state, but that was still a long time coming. Read about the wild papal conclaves of the past at Jstor Daily. -via Strange Company 

Simon's Cat meets a stray named Teddy who has been homeless for some time, but not long enough to be feral. The cat feels sorry for him and tries to find him a new home. But Teddy wants to live somewhere where he will fit in on his own terms. This three-minute cartoon is actually an edit of an earlier, much longer story that explains the backstory of the cat Teddy. The reason the cartoon was edited for re-release is that the real Teddy, who lived with Simon's Cat creator Simon Tofield, recently passed away. This is a tribute to him.

See, Tofield has always drawn inspiration from his own cats, past and present. Teddy was a black cat who was the original inspiration for "the kitten," Tofield's second animated cat character after Simon's Cat. But then the real life Teddy grew up, while the animated kitten did not, and Teddy deserved his own character. The cat may be gone, but the character will remain.

The Nikon Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards gets bigger every year, and this year they have been renamed for their sponsor. The 44 finalists for 2024 have been selected, so go see them all in this gallery. Click on each photo to bring up a full-size version. See the finalists in the video category here.   



The announcement of the finalists also means that voting is now open for the People's Choice Award until October 31st. Vote for your favorite at this page, and you'll be entered into a sweepstakes. The winners in all nine categories of the competition will be announced on December 10th. -via Real Clear Science

We've seen typewriters used as musical instruments a few times, and while it's cool, it's not all that melodic. But now it is.  Brazilian pianist Fabricio André Bernard Di Paolo, or Lord Vinheteiro (previously at Neatorama) is not only a talented musician, he has a deep knowledge of every every note on every piano key. He attached strings to his piano so that he could play it by typing on two typewriters! Now the piano is a stringed instrument. Sure, he did the attaching, but keeping track of which key goes with which note takes a lot of cognitive bandwidth. Not only that, but he is playing the melody with his left hand, and the bass rhythm with his right, because he has his back to the piano. That's somewhat akin to playing the piano from its backside, but harder because it's two typewriters. The song sounds lovely, punctuated by the clacking of the typewriter keys.

It is believed that a quarter of adult house cats suffer the chronic pain of osteoarthritis. That may be a price they pay for longer lives as pets. Existing treatment comes with side effects, so more research into feline pain is needed. But have you ever tried to take an electroencephalogram (EEG) of a cat? No, you haven't, but a team from the University of Montreal in Quebec has manage to do it for the first time ever on cats who were awake.

Cats aren't cooperative research subjects, and will not tolerate electrodes stuck on their heads. Co-author of the study Aliénor Delsart said the scientists were spending more time putting the electrodes back on the cats than they were doing the EEGs. The solution is the little cap the cat shown above is wearing. The team contacted a graduate student who crocheted, and she made the cats little caps that the electrodes were attached to. The cats tolerated them, as they would an owner who wanted to take pictures for cat memes. It wasn't a total success, as two cats had to be excluded from the study when they couldn't get with the program, but getting an EEG at all from a cat is a breakthrough. Read more about this research at Ars Technica.

(Image credit: Aliénor Delsart)

As we slide into October, it's time to get to know the creatures of Halloween. The more we know about them, the less frightening they are.

Bats are scary because they fly in the dark and you won't see them coming until they startle you with a sense of movement out of the corner of your eye. There's something alien about mammals that fly and rest by hanging upside down. But they have their place in the ecosystem, as some bats eat thousands of mosquitos every night, while others pollinate crops. At Bat World Sanctuary in Texas, injured or orphaned bats can be sheltered and then released back into the wild, and bats rescued from labs and zoos can find a permanent home. They know how to make bats less alien-looking just by turning the camera upside down! Then they are just animals dealing with weird gravity. You can get to know more of the residents of Bat World at Instagram, and in a gallery of livestreams.

You've heard of the turducken, a holiday feast consisting of three deboned birds stuffed inside each other- a chicken inside a duck inside a turkey. It's an over-the-top display of carnivorous excess and culinary skills, but it's really nothing new. A cookbook from 1800 gives us a recipe for Yorkshire Christmas pie, which starts with five birds! You debone "a turkey, a goose, a fowl, a partridge and a pigeon" and stuff each inside the larger bird. We might assume the "fowl" is a chicken or duck. There's more, as you are instructed to fill the rest of the pie crust with pieces of hare on one side and all the game fowl you can get on the other side. Along with spices, you add four pounds of butter and bake it for four hours. And then hope that all your guests show up and have an appetite.

Other holiday pies are described, like a beefsteak pie made with beef slices and pickles, and two recipes for mincemeat pie that really had meat in them 200 years ago. Read all these recipes for autumn pies at All Things Georgian.  -via Strange Company

(Unrelated image credit: Harris & Ewing)

The term "Wall Street" is used to denote the American hub of finance and stock trading. It's used more as an idea than as a place, but it is also a real street in Manhattan. You recognize it by the big bronze bull, which is actually on Broadway, but still in the financial district. But how did that financial district come about? The story goes back almost 400 years in the history of New York, at least to explain where the name came from. It took a lot longer for Wall Street to cement its reputation for trade and finance. These days, the actual neighborhood in New York doesn't have all that many banks and investment companies left. But when you hear the term Wall Street, you know what someone is talking about. If you're interested in the subject, you can read a timeline of Wall Street's history here. -via Laughing Squid

Although people with land have always buried their pets, the first urban pet cemetery was founded in London in 1881 when a distraught family asked if they could bury their small dog Cherry in the garden of the gatekeeper's house at Hyde Park. The gatekeeper, Mr. Winbridge, agreed, and soon other people asked for the same dignified rites. The pet cemetery at Hyde Park is still there today. But the US has many more pet cemeteries, and there are others sporting gravestones and memorials all over the world. Historian, photographer, and author Paul Koudounaris visited many of those cemeteries over the last ten years, taking photographs and talking to grieving pet owners for his new book Faithful Unto Death: Pet Cemeteries, Animal Graves and Eternal Devotion.



Koudounaris even worked for a time as a grief counselor for pet owners to gain insight into the love people have for their pets. After all, the memorials they use to honor those pets aren't so much about the pets themselves, but about our memories of them and the love and appreciation that continues after death. Read about the book and the many memorials for beloved pets at Smithsonian. And get a preview of Koudounaris' book by clicking to the right on both images above.

Warning: this video will make you hungry. Pasta is an amazing food. It's made of wheat, like bread, but can be stored for a long period without going bad. It's easy to cook, and it fills you up. But most important, it can carry a full dish of flavor depending on what sauce or other ingredients you combine it with. It can help a small amount of meat or soup feed an entire family. It's no wonder pasta is popular all over. We consume it in a variety of forms, from ramen to lasagna to Kraft Dinner. But where did it really come from? How was it developed? And how can we get some right now?

Weird History Food takes us through the history of pasta, as much as we know, plus the many different shapes it comes in and why they exist at all, and also the process for making pasta in a factory. Now excuse me, I have to put on some water to boil.

We already knew that hummingbirds are pretty extreme. They are the world's smallest bird, their wings flap at 50 times a second, they have tongues that wrap around their brains like woodpeckers. But that's just the beginning of how these tiny, beautiful creatures push the envelope among bird species, and frankly, among animals. 

For example, hummingbirds are the only bird that can fly upside down or backwards. At certain times of the year, they can spend 13 hours a day flying, searching for nectar. They have amazing metabolisms that they can change at will, so that their energy expenditures while sleeping or in winter are barely above what will sustain life. They can fly at altitudes that a helicopter won't attempt. The sugar water they consume causes them to have blood sugar levels six times that of a human, but they've developed ways to deal with that, and with the relatively massive amounts of fluids they consume. How do they do it all? Several scientists who are hummingbird experts have put in the work, and they tell us how it's done at Knowable Magazine. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: Paul Danese)

The New Zealand filmmaking group AFK is producing a Star Wars fan film series on YouTube called For the Empire. You can see all the episodes so far in this playlist. It's an epic saga, but occasionally an episode stands alone rather well. In this one, the stormtrooper TK-FNG gets busted for incompetence and demoted. His assignments deteriorate until he finds himself guarding a Clone Wars fan convention. Then as his shift ends, he encounters his own cosplaying son, TK-FKU, attending the con. The two get a chance to catch up with each other even though they are quite different. In other words, it's a weird family bonding night.

This episode has a callback to one we posted earlier, in that TK-FNG finds himself on an elevator with Darth Vader and his wheezing on the worst day of his life. The stormtrooper has come a long way since then, and he handles it bit differently this time. -via Geeks Are Sexy

The pop culture idea of witches that make up our Halloween decorations and costumes is pretty benign, but the real historical women who were accused of witchcraft are tragic tales. These were women who stood out in some way, who caused trouble or else were a scapegoat for superstitious fears. They were shunned, tortured, or even executed in gruesome ways.

Even after the era of witch killings, women who didn't fit in or upheld the standards of respectability were labeled as witches, and that reputation can follow one beyond death. The graves of some women have carried their reputations and are considered haunted. Meg Shelton's grave has a huge boulder laid atop, to make sure she never comes back. Susan Gavan’s grave has a small fence around it, but is that to keep people who get too close from being cursed? Bathsheba Sherman was accused of killing her infant, and a movie franchise grew up around her story.

This has even happened to a couple of gravesites in which the deceased had never been considered a witch in life -or may have never existed at all. It's a common story: someone approaches a gravesite, becomes spooked by a sound or a gust of wind, and has to tell someone. Urban legends grow up around these sites, and every encounter gives someone else a story to tell. Read about eight graves allegedly haunted by the witch buried there at Mental Floss. Six of them are in the US, in case you want to plan an autumn road trip.

Every once in a while, you have to pass a CAPTCHA test to use something on the internet. This is supposed to prove you're a human user, and not a robot or an algorithm trying to introduce spam, malware, or misinformation. Sure, we understand why these are sadly necessary, but they can be enraging. You may be instructed to check all boxes that contain a traffic light, for example, but they don't tell us whether the pole holding it is included. Or the indicated object is too far away to see. Or you may miss a tiny corner. Bingo- you've been labeled as a 'bot and cannot access what you came for. Requesting a different image may or may not improve your chances, but you get the feeling that just the request causes a bias against you. Who comes up with these things?

It takes an entire team, but the photographer is Landra Fontaine, who loves her job because she's a sadist. And a trickster. A professional troll. You might even call her the scum of the earth. The next time you are confounded by a CAPTCHA, you will know who to blame. -via Laughing Squid