Most people today carry around at least a trace of Neanderthal DNA, the legacy of reproduction between Homo sapiens and Homo neanderthalensis thousands of years ago. Genetic studies show that such interbreeding happened time and again in different populations, and although we don't know the circumstances, we might assume that a variety of circumstances were involved over time. An article at BBC Future begins with a scenario taken from romance novels, but soon gets into the science of Neanderthal-modern human relations, like a study of Neanderthal dental plaque. Anthropologist Laura Weyrich discovered the common oral microbe Methanobrevibacter oralis, but this sample was the human version, not the variety that normally inhabited Neanderthal mouths.

Weyrich explains that one possible route for the transfer is kissing. “When you kiss someone, oral microbes will go back and forth between your mouths,” she says. “It could have happened once but then sort of been somehow magically propagated, if it happened that the group of people who were infected went on to be very successful. But it could also be something that occurred more regularly.”

Another way to transfer your oral microbes is by sharing food. And although there is no direct evidence of a Neanderthal preparing a meal for an early modern human, a romantic meal could have been an alternative source of M. oralis.

Such studies also give us insight into Neanderthal-human transfer of sex-linked chromosomes, cancer, STDs, and immune systems. This much sharing may eventually lead us to conclude that humans didn't wipe out the Neanderthals so much as we just absorbed them. -via Digg 

(Image credit: Trougnouf/Benoit Brummer)

The United States has been swearing in presidents since 1789. While there has been an effort to make the ceremony consistent and traditional, each one is slightly different. Of course, when a president dies, his successor may take the oath of office in strange circumstances: one in an airplane, another oath administered by the president's father. But even the public ceremonies have had their moments, like when Andrew Johnson showed up drunk. Believe it or not, two different inaugurations had to contend with dead birds! Then there's the story of two Founding Fathers and their on-again, off-again friendship.

For many years, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson had been close friends. Together, they’d helped create the Declaration of Independence, worked in Europe as fellow diplomats, and had even stolen a piece of Shakespeare’s favorite chair. (Seriously.)

But as their political careers diverged, the two became rivals. When Jefferson was inaugurated on March 4, 1801, Adams was nowhere to be found. Eight hours before the big event, he’d left Washington and started making his way back to his family farm in Braintree, Massachusetts. This made Adams the first president who chose to skip his successor’s swearing-in ceremony. (History repeated itself 28 years later, when John Quincy Adams boycotted Andrew Jackson’s inauguration. Like father, like son.)

Adams and Jefferson eventually made up when, in 1811, Adams casually told some houseguests, “I always loved Jefferson, and I still love him.” Mutual friends forwarded this comment along to Monticello. Jefferson was thrilled. “I only needed this knowledge to revive towards [Adams] all of the affections of the most cordial moments of our lives,” he proclaimed. Over the next 15 years, the two ex-presidents exchanged more than 150 friendly letters. They both died within hours of each other on the same day—July 4, 1826.

Read the details of the 35 weirdest stories Mental Floss dug up about presidential inaugurations.

One that didn't make the list, but was certainly memorable, was the drunken brawl following Andrew Jackson's inauguration.

Four different species of praying mantises watch a small scale TV set made from a phone in their comfy living room. You might rightly assume that they have their preferences in subject matter- in this case, a cartoon of tasty, tasty butterflies. -via Laughing Squid

Mood-altering drugs are not all the same. Opium is plant-based, LSD is synthetic (although often adulterated), and mushrooms are fungi. A fungus can go through a lot and still survive enough to grow. A yet-to-be-published report tells of a 30-year-old man, an experienced opioid user, who injected himself with a "tea" made from magic mushrooms, which led to a serious infection.  

Days before the ER visit, he had decided to use mushrooms by first boiling them down into what he called “mushroom tea,” then filtering the mixture through a cotton swab and intravenously injecting it. Soon after, he developed symptoms including lethargy, jaundice, diarrhea, and nausea, along with vomiting up blood.

By the time he was admitted to the hospital’s intensive care unit, multiple organs had started to fail, including his lungs and kidney. Tests revealed that he had both a bacterial and fungal infection in his blood, meaning that the mushrooms he injected were now literally feeding off him and growing. Among other treatments, he was given an intense course of antibiotics and antifungal drugs.

The man spent 22 days in the hospital, and even after discharge is taking antimicrobial drugs. Read more of the story at Gizmodo.

(Image credit: Alan Rockefeller)

It’s not often that Screen Junkies gives us an Honest Trailer for movie that’s still in theaters. Or scratch that, let’s say a new movie, because Wonder Woman 1984 is both in theaters and on HBO. Still, you’ve wondered whether this movie was worth seeing. The critical reception wasn’t all that great, but we’ve suffered from a real lack of blockbuster superhero movies lately, and we’ve become used to them. So strap in and see what WW84 is all about. Be mindful that this Honest Trailer is full of spoilers, as they all are.

Bella Rose gets really excited when the horses leave the gate! According to her owner Madison Coates, Bella is a fan of all animal activities on TV, although horse racing is her favorite. -via Laughing Squid

Napoleon Bonaparte was only 51 when he died in exile on the island of Saint Helena in 1821. Doctors who attended his autopsy concluded that the cause was untreated stomach cancer, which caused years of suffering. Irish surgeon Barry Edward O’Meara described the former emperor's condition in a recently-sold letter from 1818.

“I found [Napoleon] laboring under a considerable degree of fever, his countenance displaying anxiety and being evidently that of a man who was experiencing severe corporeal sufferings,” O’Meara observed.

He added that the politician’s symptoms included “great increase of pain in the Right side, rending headache, general anxiety and oppression, skin hot and dry, pulse quickened,” all of which signaled a “crisis of a serious natures.”

While O'Meara had reason to exaggerate Napoleon's condition, the letter is one of the rare artifacts of his final years in exile. Read more about Napoleon's death at Smithsonian.

(Image credit: Charles von Steuben)

Luxembourg trucking company P. Adams Schwertransporte posted pictures of a truck that you might find hard to wrap your head around. The cargo is a rotor blade that's 67 meters (220 feet) long! Yes, holding it up in the air certainly makes negotiating turns and traffic easier, but what incredible balancing powers this must require. Sure, the inner end of the blade is much heavier than the other end, but just imagine what a change in the weather could do to this rig.  What a sight to see this drive past your home! -via Jalopnik

When the 18th Amendment made booze illegal in the US, people went to great lengths to get something alcoholic to drink. Industrial methanol found its way into bootleg liquor, leaving behind blind or even dead drinkers by the thousands over the period known as Prohibition. Dr. W.H. Miles of the Oklahoma City Health Board was familiar with methanol poisoning, but he and his assistant Dr. Ephraim Goldfain began seeing cases of paralysis in 1930 that they suspected were from drinking alcohol, yet the symptoms differed from anything they'd seen before.  

But the strange paralysis exhibited by Dr. Miles and Dr. Goldfain’s patients was something completely new. After tracking down and investigating more than 60 cases, the pair soon noticed an intriguing pattern: all the victims were regular users of Jamaica Ginger, a popular brand of Patent Medicine. Patent Medicines were a type of proprietary cure-all sold over-the-counter in most drugstores. These could contain all kinds of substances, including herbal extracts, opium, cocaine, turpentine, and mineral oil, but not – strangely enough – actual snake oil. But one ingredient nearly all brands had in common was copious amounts of alcohol – up to 90% in certain cases. This had made Patent Medicines a popular source of alcohol in dry counties for decades. Jamaica Ginger was especially popular among poor labourers in the South. Boasting a 90% alcohol content and costing only 35 cents a bottle, it was typically mixed with soft drinks at soda fountains to help cut down its strong bitter flavour. Among drinkers the concoction was commonly known as ‘Jake’, and the paralysis it caused soon came to be known as ‘Jake Leg’ or ‘Jake Walk’.

But while the link between Jake consumption and paralysis was convincing, it was also puzzling. Jamaica Ginger had been sold since 1863 without any negative effects. What had changed?

The story as it unraveled revealed shenanigans with regulatory systems and the way manufacturers tried to get around them, which you can read at Today I Found Out.

(Image source: Library of Congress)

When you hammer a nail into a tree or a block of wood, it stays there. That's how nails are useful to us. Now consider the woodpecker. A woodpecker drives its beak into a tree with the force of a hammer, but then immediately pulls the beak out to hammer again. You've probably never thought about that before, but scientists have, and by slowing downside close-up footage of a woodpecker in action, they've figured out how they do it.

Once the tip of the woodpecker’s bill hits the wood, the bird’s head rotates to the side ever so slightly, lifting the top part of the beak and twisting it a bit in the other direction, the videos reveal. This pull opens the bill a tiny amount and creates free space between the beak tip and the wood at the bottom of the punctured hole, so the bird can then easily retract its beak.

-via Boing Boing

The Netflix series Bridgerton takes place in England between 1813 and 1827, which is known as the Regency Era. In the opening scene of the first episode, we see a maid lacing up a woman ever-tighter in her corset. The scene is a metaphor that’s quite common in period dramas, signaling how woman had no freedom, and were constrained by societal expectations to shape themselves into someone acceptable, no matter the pain or effort involved.

The trouble is that nearly all of these depictions are exaggerated, or just plain wrong. This is not to say “Bridgerton” showrunner Shonda Rhimes erred in her portrayal of women’s rights during the early 19th-century Regency era—they were indeed severely restricted, but their undergarments weren’t to blame.

“It’s less about the corset and more about the psychology of the scene,” says Kass McGann, a clothing historian who has consulted for museums, TV shows and theater productions around the world and who founded and owns the blog/historical costuming shop Reconstructing History, in an email.

Over four centuries of uncountable changes in fashion, women’s undergarments went through wide variations in name, style and shape. But for those whose understanding of costume dramas comes solely from shows and movies like “Bridgerton,” these different garments are all just lumped together erroneously as corsets.

There’s nothing wrong with using metaphors in movies or TV to make a point, but if you want historical information about women and their underwear, period dramas aren’t the most accurate source. Learn how corsets and other foundation garments were really used in the Regency Era and beyond at Smithsonian.

Who an actor is should never be confused with the roles he plays, but cinematic history is littered with talented people done in by their offscreen personalities and/or personal lives. Those successful at avoiding such fate are often playing a part even when they aren't playing a part. Cary Grant was a master of such role-playing. When not in character, he was the ultimate gentleman: confident, stylish, charming, and in control, with just the right amount of masculinity and aloofness. This facade made it all the harder to get to know him. Hollywood biographer Scott Eyman's new book Cary Grant: A Brilliant Disguise tries to find the real man, Archibald Leach, who became Cary Grant.  

Grant reached a level of fame rarely achieved, let alone sustained over decades, with so many great films bearing his name. The actor often joked that he wished he was Cary Grant. He was always torn between his origins as a poor kid from Bristol and the Hollywood legend he became. A friend once wrote of Grant, “when we were out together in Beverly Hills, people usually didn’t approach him, or interfere. He was an object of awe. Being famous, visibly famous, is a terrible fate.” The truth is that Grant had a brilliantly constructed persona, better than anything a studio marketing team could have developed.

Platypuses are the weirdest animals in the weirdest class of mammals known as monotremes. They lay eggs, feed their young with milk, have venomous spurs, and glow in the dark. They have duck bills, webbed feet, and fur. But when you look at them at a molecular level, they are even weirder. Scientists have recently managed to sequence a male platypus’s DNA, and found some surprising things.  

The authors were particularly interested in the animal's sex chromosomes, which appear to have originated independently from other therian mammals, all of which contain a simple XY pair.

The platypus, however, is the only known animal with 10 sex chromosomes (echidnas have nine). Platypus have 5X and 5Y chromosomes organised in a ring that appears to have broken apart into pieces over the course of mammalian evolution.

Comparing this chromosome information to humans, opossums, Tasmanian devils, chickens, and lizard genomes, the authors found the platypus's sex chromosomes have more in common with birds like chickens than mammals such as humans.

Read how the platypus genome resembles an interspecies chimera of sorts at ScienceAlert. -via Damn Interesting

You might think you're watching a travelogue from a train until you see the giant feline stalking your ride! Jonathan Lawton of West Yorkshire built this model railway and strapped a camera on the front, which is infinitely enhanced when his cat Mittens joins in the fun. -via Digg