A couple of years ago, we shared a chart that explained the different vegetables that all come from the plant species Brassica oleracea. The same can be said of the plant's cousin, Brassica rapa, from which we grow turnips, grelos, bok choy, mizuna, and broccoli rabe.  A new study aims to find the geographical origin of B. rapa, which may have been domesticated as long as 6,000 years ago.

The work is a particular achievement when you consider both the diversity and global spread of B. rapa crops, wild relatives, and feral varieties that have escaped farmers’ fields, “taking over the world,” says Alex McAlvay, lead author of the study and a botanist at the New York Botanical Garden. Now, he says, B. rapa, in various forms, “grows from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego. They grow in Oceania, they grow from Spain to Japan.

“You can go to San Diego, to the coast, and see wild Brassica rapa,” he adds. “But they’re not truly wild. They’re like the stray dogs that have escaped and formed their own pack in the woods.” B. rapa’s ability to survive as a feral plant worldwide had created a lot of uncertainty about its origins. Botanists often look to wild relatives of crops to help understand where the plants were first domesticated. But B. rapa is everywhere and, before the new research, distinguishing truly wild species from feral escapees was almost impossible.

The upside of B. rapa's ability to adapt to local conditions could make it very useful for communities dealing with the environmental flux of climate change. Read what we know and what we're trying to learn about B. rapa and the foods it provides at Atlas Obscura.

(Image credit: Flickr user el Buho nº30)

Malcolm-Jamal Warner has been jammin' on the one since Aug. 18, 1970. Today, the 'Cosby Show' star is 18,530 days old, making him the same age as Wilford Brimley on the day 'Cocoon' was released. Congrats @MalcolmJamalWar! You've reached the Brimley/Cocoon Line. pic.twitter.com/xfNPoSqUA7

— Brimley/Cocoon Line (@BrimleyLine) May 12, 2021

You might recall the 1985 film Cocoon as a rare science fiction movie about elderly people in a retirement home. One of the stars, Wilford Brimley, was only 49 years old when he got the part! When Cocoon was released on June 21, 1985, he was a mere 50 years, 9 months, and 3 days old (he died last year at the age of 85). To highlight the age anomaly of Brimley's Cocoon casting, the Brimley/Cocoon Line Twitter account was launched. The feed marks the day that celebrities reach the same age that Wilford Brimley was when Cocoon was released.

But why should celebrities have all the fun? Lindsey Smith, inspired by the Twitter feed, has posted an online calculator so that you can figure when you will cross the Brimley/Cocoon Line. I tried it, but got too tired clicking back to my birth year. Besides, I crossed that line long ago. -via Laughing Squid

This past week, investigators announced they had cracked what is believed to be the oldest case solved with DNA and forensic genealogy -- dating to 1956. https://t.co/sIvOczsSjl

— NPR (@NPR) June 13, 2021

In 1956, the bodies of 18-year-old Lloyd Duane Bogle and his girlfriend, 16-year-old Patricia Kalitzke, were found in the mountains near Great Falls, Montana. They had both been shot in the back of the head, and Kalitzke had been raped. Investigators did their best, but no perpetrator was found, and the case remained open for more than 60 years. Forensic science has come a long way since 1956, and such a murder today would rely heavily on DNA evidence. Kalitzke's vaginal swab stayed in the evidence file, but virtually no one had a DNA profile at the time, and all these years later anyone evolved in the case was liable to be dead. Could they solve this crime using DNA?  

With the help of partnering labs, forensic genealogists are able to use preserved samples to create a DNA profile of the culprit and then use that profile to search public databases for any potential matches. In most cases, those profiles can end up linking to distant relatives of the culprit — say, a second or third cousin. By searching public records (such as death certificates and newspaper clippings), forensic genealogists are then able to construct a family tree that can point them right to the suspect, even if that suspect has never provided their DNA to any public database.

In this case, "Our genealogists, what they're going to do is independently build a family tree from this cousin's profile," Andrew Singer, an executive with Bode Technology, told NPR. He called it "a reverse family tree. ... We're essentially going backwards. We're starting with a distant relative and trying to work back toward our unknown sample."

Read where that search went and how the case became the oldest ever solved by DNA at NPR. -via Damn Interesting

Now that you've been vaccinated, you might be looking forward to traveling. If you want to start small and avoid crowds, how about a day trip to your nearest ghost town? These are towns that once thrived, but where abandoned for any of a dozen reasons. However, if the towns were built well enough to last a while, preservationists eventually discovered and protected them. Now they are windows into the past, full of life and history if you are willing to go there and learn about them. Atlas Obscura has links to 22 of these ghost towns and what you need to know before visiting them. -via Nag on the Lake

(Image credit: Drown Soda)

The myth of Atlantis may have arisen from the many real-life cases of cities that sunk into the water. There are quite a few reasons for this happening- earthquakes, tsunamis, changing ocean levels, and even deliberate acts such as dam building and dyke busting. Archaeological evidence shows us underwater places around the world where people once thrived, such as Atlit Yam in Israel, which sank around 6300 BC.

This Neolithic village lies 26 to 39 feet (8 to 12 m) beneath the Mediterranean Sea, hidden for over 8,000 years until marine archaeologist Ehud Galili discovered it while surveying the sand for shipwrecks in 1984, New Scientist reported. It is now considered one of the oldest submerged settlements ever discovered. Careful excavations have revealed rectangular houses with hearths and the remains of a dry-stone well. One of the most interesting finds was a megalith structure — similar to Stonehenge — built around a spring, made of seven huge stones weighing around 1,300 pounds (600 kilograms) each; burial sites and human remains have also been unearthed. One study suggests that a tsunami is likely to blame for the abandonment of the settlement, Live Science previously reported.

Read about eight sunken cities and what caused their demise at LiveScience. -via Strange Company

(Image credit: Hanay)

The modern concept of Satan is recognizable to all of us, but his few mentions in the Bible aren't where they come from. Much of the devil's iconic characteristics come from later writers and artists. -via Boing Boing

Joseph Herscher of Joseph's Machines (previously) designed a complicated but clever chain-reaction machine to make a pizza with pepperoni and olives. It makes a pizza in less than two minutes (the crust is pre-made), but the credits include a device to feed Joseph a slice of pizza. That part is not all that precise, and proves a bit messy. -via Geeks Are Sexy

Ana di Pištonja was born in Vladimirovac, Yugoslavia (now Serbia) in 1838, or sometime thereabouts. Later in life, she became known as Baba Anujka. After a disastrous relationship when she was young, Anujka taught herself chemistry, particularly how to make poison.  

Anujka made a laboratory in one wing of her house after her husband died, and she earned a reputation as a healer and herbalist in the late 19th century. She was popular with wives of farmers who sought her help for health problems, and she earned a respectable income which enabled her to live comfortably. She produced medicines and mixtures which would make soldiers ill enough to escape military service, and she also sold poisonous mixtures which she branded “magic water” or “love potions”. She sold the so-called “magic water” mostly to women with abusive husbands; they would give the concoction to their husbands, who would usually die after about eight days.

Anujka’s “love potion” contained arsenic in small quantities and certain plant toxins that were difficult to detect. When told about a marriage problem, Anujka would ask her client, “How heavy is that problem?”, which meant, “What is the body mass of the victim?” She was then able to calculate the dose needed. Anujka’s victims were usually men, typically young and healthy. Her clients claimed at her trial that they did not know that her “magic water” contained poison, but that they believed that she had some kind of supernatural powers to kill people using magic. Anujka’s potions killed between 50 and 150 people.

The reason she is known as "the world's oldest serial killer" is because she was 90 years old when she was finally arrested! Read the tale of Baba Anujka at Vintage Everyday. -via Strange Company

In the early 1850s, two brothers left their home in Massachusetts and decided to build a farm on the frontier near Eureka, Wisconsin. They were twins, unusually close twins, who pooled their resources to buy land, and they built a magnificent home together.

Just outside a small, rural Wisconsin farm town, lay the ruins of a grand mansion. In stark contrast to the flat, surrounding fields and scattered barns, was the peculiar sight of a once opulent home that wouldn’t have looked out of place on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue during the Gilded Age. For years, mystery surrounded the empty ruin, with local legends spoken of secret stairways and underground tunnels; some suggesting the decaying manse had been used during Prohibition as a hideout for Al Capone. But the real mystery of the crumbling mansion was even more remarkable. For the house was built in two halves, each side a perfect mirror of the other, inside and out. Enter through the front door and you’d discover two kitchens, four parlour rooms, two dining rooms, and nearly a dozen bedrooms, each half designed and decorated as an exact copy of the other.

Built in 1852, virtually in the middle of nowhere, this mansion was an oddity in its own right – and that was before you even saw who lived there. The unusual Victorian mirrored home was built by identical twin brothers, Argalus and Augustus Foote, who were so inseparable in life, they even married women with matching initials in a double wedding, Augustus to Ann, and Argalus to Adelia. The Foote twins set about building a dream home where each family would live parallel lives in their own half of the mansion. But tragedy would soon descend upon the house, leaving it to fall into ruin. This is the story of the mysterious Foote mansion.

The Foote brothers only lived in the mansion a few years, then moved on to Oshkosh. But the mansion stayed, and outlived the brothers by more than 100 years, without residents for most of that time. Read the story of the legendary Foote mansion at Messy Nessy Chic.

No, that crazy price Carvana offered for your car isn't too good to be true. https://t.co/acxaFwjNM5 pic.twitter.com/4xzdKaXVGM

— Road & Track (@RoadandTrack) June 9, 2021

Online car sellers Carvana and Vroom have automatic apps through which you can get an offer on your used car, whether you're serious about selling it or not. Some of those offers have gone viral because people cannot believe how much some cars are worth to them, more than the car was purchased for, and sometimes more than the price of a new model!

The strangeness is most visible on social media, where it’s easy to find reports of online-only retailers like Carvana and Vroom offering stratospheric buyout prices for everyday used cars. Often prices for extra-hot used vehicles, like the Jeep Wrangler and Toyota Tacoma, approach or exceed the suggested retail price for their new counterparts. Clearly, one might naturally assume, someone is losing money here. “Disrupting” the market by burning investor cash is a classic Silicon Valley play, one that defined the rise of Uber. It wouldn’t be surprising to see online retailers using COVID-19-related market shifts and piles of VC money to gobble up market share while taking substantial losses.

Yet that’s not what’s happening. It may defy surface-level logic and stun onlookers, but the trade-in values and used car prices at online retailers aren’t outliers.

“The market is absolutely on fire,” Jonathan Banks, J.D. Power vice president and general manager of vehicle valuations, told Road & Track. “Dealers are going to pay you perhaps even more, depending on where you’re at. Especially if you have a Tacoma. Gosh, if you have a Tacoma it’s like a gold mine. Your Tacoma, your Wrangler, your F-150, dealers are going to pay you top-dollar price as well. So this is not a Carvana phenomenon.”

What's behind these crazy prices? You guessed it: a shortage of new cars. The reasons are a combination of what happened to toilet paper last year and what happened to real estate this year. Read about the factors feeding a red-hot used car market at Road and Track. -via Digg

Let's be honest: ticks are awful. Ze Frank tells us all about ticks, and he doesn't sugarcoat anything, so be warned. That said, there are plenty of things to snicker at in his entertaining explanation if you aren't too squicked out over the subject matter.

Jen Yates introduces us to a new trend in cake decorating that may seem a treat, but one might also suspect it's a shortcut to a "decorated" cake. It's the practice of adding well known candies on top of the iced cake. In their original wrappers. Now, a candy wrapper is useful for identifying the brand and flavor of a candy bar, and to keep the candy clean inside. But you don't expect the outside of the wrapper to be all that clean.  

And digging through icing with your fingers just to unwrap a piece of chocolate that is covered in chocolate and then smooshed into chocolate sounds about as appealing as... ooh, look!

Chocolate!

You can see plenty more examples of this trend at Cake Wrecks.

Andrea Love animated the process of making lemonade with tiny needle-felted miniatures. Cute! You have to love that tiny honey bear. -via reddit

Anthropologists estimate that humans have been around for about 300,000 years. For about 290,000 of those years, there was relative equality in status for everyone. Sure, these small hunter-gatherer groups listened to the wisdom of elders and made allowances for children, but they didn't have chiefs or rulers or wealthy people that bossed the rest around. It didn't take all that long for human society to separate people into the haves and the have-nots, whether we are talking about wealth, power, or status. So what happened?

There are two developments in mobile forager cultures that tend to set the stage for the establishment of inequality. One such scaffold to inequality was the emergence of clan structure. Clans have a strong corporate identity, built around real or mythical genealogical connection, reinforced by demanding initiation rites and intense collective activities. They become central to an individual’s social identity. Individuals see themselves, and are seen by others, primarily through their clan identity. They expect and get social support mostly within their clan, as the anthropologist Raymond C Kelly writes in Warless Societies and the Origin of War (2000). Once storage and farming emerged, incipient elites used clan membership to mobilise social and material support.

The second development was the emergence of a quasi-elite based on the control of information, which created a hierarchy of prestige and esteem, rather than wealth and power. This was originally based on subsistence skills. Forager life depends on very high levels of expertise in navigation, tracking, plant identification, animal behaviour, and artisan skills. The genuinely expert attract deference and respect in return for generously sharing their knowledge, as the evolutionary biologist Joseph Henrich argues in The Secret of Our Success (2015). As the social anthropologist Jerome Lewis has shown, this economy of information can include story and music, and the same can be true of its ritual and normative life. Indeed, there might be a fusion of ritual with subsistence information, if ritual narratives are used as a vehicle for encoding important but rarely used spatial and navigational information. There’s some suggestion of this fusion in Australian Aboriginal songlines, and the idea is expanded from Australia and defended in detail by the orality scholar Lynne Kelly in Knowledge and Power in Prehistoric Societies (2015). So there can be expertise and deference not just in subsistence skills, but also with regards to religion and ritual.

So the elites tended to rise based on who you know or what you know. But none of that would have led to the world we live in if it weren't for one crucial development: agriculture. Read how these forces came together to produce stratified societies at Aeon. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: David Hawgood)

Whatever you were expecting, this is not it. It's even more surprising. Watch the video before you continue reading. Yeah, it's a glitch, one that hatsuseno explained.

If I had to wager a guess, it's a software encoder with a bug where a b-frame is stuck in a buffer somewhere, the differential is still calculated from an updated one, but the 'stuck' b-frame is getting pushed into the stream. Interesting defect, implies inefficient code too.

And then MagusVulpes translated that into English.

Camera takes two pictures, prepares one while showing the other. The prepared picture is stuck and not taking a new picture, while the shown picture tries to do what it's supposed to.

So, when the camera switches from picture 1 to picture 2, picture 2 forces the background onto the image picture 1 it's trying to show. Kinda like an unintended green screen effect.

The homeowner, oxygn, said that the glitch righted itself when he turned the system off and on again. -via reddit