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

When President John Adams was 85 years old, he attended a conference in Massachusetts and came down with the flu, which he suffered from for several weeks. However, it did not curb his activities much, as he related in a latter to his daughter Louisa.   

He wrote to Louisa after he recovered, saying, “I have had the influenza, and with great difficulty have got the better of it — but not perfectly cured.” Apparently it started as a cold that just got worse. “I attended every day the Convention,” he wrote, “and the air of that hall — instead of curing my cold imperceptibly increased it from day to day.”

Did he really expect the air of a crowded room to cure his cold? There was still a lot to learn as far as how colds and flus were spread in 1820, and Adams likely spread his disease far and wide. He wrote, “The unceasing hospitality of the gentlemen in Boston compelled me most willingly to accept invitations to dinner, almost everyday.”

Here is where the contact tracing list begins: “The company was most fascinating — an assemblage of the power, authority, wealth, genius, learning, and politeness of the State — the Governor, Lieutenant Governor, the President of Harvard College, the President of the Senate, the Chief Justice and other Judges, Mr. Webster, Mr. Prescot, Mr. Storry, some of the best of the clergy, strangers of distinction, electors of President and Vice President, and whatever characters there were most precious composed the company.”

In Adams' time, there were arguments back and forth about how illness spread. Adams attributed sickness to the weather, while Benjamin Franklin advocated for fresh air to blow stale air away. Neither really understood how diseases spreads, because no one did. Read about Adams' flu and how the former president might have infected all of Boston's elite at Plodding Through the Presidents. -via Strange Company

There's something very appealing about human skulls carved out of crystal. We now associate them with an Indiana Jones movie and the inspiration for a celebrity vodka, but for more than a century, they were sought-after relics of the Aztec Empire. In the late 1800s, these beautiful icons that illustrated the Aztecs' fascination with skulls began to be found in Mexico and sent to museums. It appears now that they are all fakes.  

When you combine the pre-Columbian fascination with skulls with the technical prowess at carving stone, it may have been easy for some to believe that these ancient people could have carved skulls out of crystal. And for nearly 150 years, that subtext helped a number of museum exhibit curators feel comfortable about displaying their crystal skulls, despite long-standing questions about these objects’ true origins.

It was only thanks to a number of investigations like Walsh’s in recent years that archaeologists have largely come to the consensus that these crystal skulls are fakes. Some still display them from time to time because of the public’s extreme interest.

So how did the crystal skull craze get started? Research traces them back to one man, who was able to profit handsomely on their authenticity because he was himself an expert on the authenticity of Mexican relics. Read that story at Discover magazine.  -via Strange Company


(Image credit: Gryffindor)

While we look forward to things calming down here on Earth, there's going to be plenty of activity in the heavens. Ars Technica put together an overview of plans that include everything from innovative rockets to private flights to the construction of a new space station. And three different nations have spacecraft scheduled to land on Mars in February!

The United Arab Emirates' first mission to the Red Planet, Mars Hope, is due to arrive on February 9. At this time, the spacecraft will make a challenging maneuver to slow down and enter orbit around Mars with an altitude above the planet as low as 1,000km. If all goes well, the spacecraft will spend a Martian year—687 Earth days—studying the planet's atmosphere and better understanding its weather.

China has not said when, exactly, that its ambitious Tianwen-1 mission will arrive at Mars, but it's expected in mid-February. After the spacecraft enters orbit, it will spend a couple of months preparing to descend to the surface, assessing the planned landing site in the Utopia Planitia region. Then, China will attempt to become only the second country to soft-land a spacecraft on Mars that survives for more than a handful of seconds. It will be a huge moment for the country's space program.  

NASA's Mars Perseverance will likely be the last of three missions to arrive at Mars, reaching the Red Planet in mid-February and attempting a landing in Jezero Crater on February 18. This entry, descent, and landing phase—much like with the Curiosity lander in 2012—will be must-see TV.

Read what else 2021 has in store for space exploration at Ars Technica. -via Digg

(Image credit: NASA/Joel Kowsky)

If you want some advice on how to spend a long lonely winter inside, safe from viruses but at risk for boredom, maybe we can take some tips from the Antarctic expeditions of a hundred years ago. Before permanent science stations and before the internet, these men knew the risk of being stranded meant they had to take along their own distractions. Most expeditions included at least one musical instrument, brought by someone who knew how to play it. The Scottish National Antarctic Expedition (1902-1904) included a designated piper, Gilbert Kerr, pictured above. (This image was the subject of some Wikipedia shenanigans a few years ago.) The crew also produced diaries and newspapers, which I guess only differed from each other by whether they were shared.

There is a long tradition of polar explorers creating newspapers for themselves. Reports on the weather or accounts of visits to penguin colonies were interspersed with short stories, poetry, interviews, crossword puzzles and word games. They were illustrated with both humorous and artistic drawings. Over time, these texts took on a great deal of sexual content, including lewd jokes and fantasies.

As one explorer explained, “The importance of not allowing any sense of depression to become a part of the atmosphere of our life was clear to all.”

There were other methods these explorers used to keep their sanity, which you may find utterly dreary in comparison to video games. But you work with what you have. Read the rest at Atlas Obscura.

When retiring a nuclear warhead during the Cold War, the technicians at Lackland Air Force Base’s Medina Annex took care to remove the enriched uranium that gave it the unearthly power of a nuclear bomb. However, there remained quite a bit of TNT that was used to ignite the bomb, plus depleted uranium and natural uranium. The detonators also remained. On November 13, 1963, one of those warheads was interred underground in the nuclear weapons bunker at the Annex. Then something happened to trip a detonator.

“There’s no direct answer to what caused it that we know of,” insisted Floyd Lutz, who is eighty and owns a water treatment business in San Antonio. “When the igloo was fixin’ to ignite, we were inside setting down those units.” As soon as that loud crack! sounded, he and Ehlinger scampered through the open doorway amid dust and smoke.

“The fire started, so we hauled ass,” Lutz explained. They sprinted past Huser, yelling as they went.

“[They] didn’t have to tell me to run,” said Huser. “They went one way; I went the other down Perimeter Road. I guess it had rained the day before, and I bogged down in a ditch and fell, got back up and turned around and looked, and there was smoke coming off of the igloo’s vent. I was going to go to the next set of igloos to set off an alarm. I got about halfway, and the whole thing blew up.”

The blast itself was bad enough, as retold by those who were there, but those in the surrounding area thought World War III had erupted. And would there be nuclear fallout? Read the story of the 1963 detonation at Texas Monthly. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: 37th TRW Office of History and Research)

They call this Nordic Noir. I'm sure you'd have to have experience with the genre to fully get the humor, but it's funny even with no context. Anyone from Scandinavia willing to share their thoughts? The comments at reddit have links to some similar shows that you might want to explore, if you're into this sort of thing.

Pop culture stories do manage to all look alike after a while. When a story works, it will work again. While not checking all the boxes, I can think of other heroes that fit this trope. Dorothy Gale for one. Frodo. King Arthur. Of course, there are reasons for all this. It's everyone's fantasy to be the hero of their own story. The lack of parents frees one to act instead being protected. Magic and special abilities make it possible. Fighting for justice against oppressive evil overlords is the epitome of heroism. The stick and the hairy friend... those are just a lot of fun. This comic is from John Atkinson at Wrong Hands. -via Geeks Are Sexy

Between 1836 and 1880, the remains of a shipwreck were visible in the sand dunes near Warrnambool on the Shipwreck Coast of Victoria, Australia. It was one of many, which is how the Shipwreck Coast got its name. This particular wreck was unusually flat-bottomed and was said to have been there so long that it was part of Gunditjmara Aboriginal folklore. Influential writers speculated that it was Portuguese, but it was only after the sands of time had reclaimed the wreckage that the legend of the Mahogany Ship took hold.

In 1977, the Portuguese theory was resurrected—and seemingly confirmed—by a book called The Secret Discovery of Australia, written by lawyer and historian, the late Kenneth McIntyre. McIntyre asserted that the Mahogany Ship was one of a trio of caravels captained by Cristóvão de Mendonça in 1522 on a covert exploration through Spanish-controlled waters. Ironically, the ships were searching for another bit of maritime lore: Marco Polo’s fabled island of gold, Jave la Grande. According to McIntyre, Mendonça successfully charted the east coast of Jave la Grande before changing course for home after the Mahogany Ship sank in a perilous storm.

McIntyre's theory rested more on speculation than evidence, but the book went to the reading list at Australian schools, and the town of Warrnambool hosts a Portuguese cultural festival in honor of the early explorers who supposedly left the Mahogany Ship behind. The buried wreck has not been found, but continues to draw scientists and treasure hunters to Warrnambool. Read the legend of the Mahogany Ship as we know it at Atlas Obscura.

Multiple witnesses in Hawaii reported an unidentified flying object Tuesday night. It was bright blue, and described as being "larger than a telephone pole." Is it an advertising stunt gone wrong? Or God seeding the ocean with a new species of nudibranch? What does it look like to you? Check out the footage as broadcast by the local ABC affiliate. -via Geekologie

The Sinai Peninsula in Egypt is the bridge between Africa and Asia. Around 4,000 years ago, the Sinai plateau called Serabit el-Khadim was a center for mining turquoise and other minerals, which drew laborers from neighboring nations who could not read Egyptian hieroglyphs. In 1905, artifacts taken from a temple in Serabit el-Khadim included a small sphinx with strange markings, which have since been identified as an alphabet, and even translated.     

“For me, it’s worth all the gold in Egypt,” the Israeli Egyptologist Orly Goldwasser said of this little sphinx when we viewed it at the British Museum in late 2018. She had come to London to be interviewed for a BBC documentary about the history of writing. In the high-ceilinged Egypt and Sudan study room lined with bookcases, separated from the crowds in the public galleries by locked doors and iron staircases, a curator brought the sphinx out of its basket and placed it on a table, where Goldwasser and I marveled at it. “Every word we read and write started with him and his friends.” She explained how miners on Sinai would have gone about transforming a hieroglyph into a letter: “Call the picture by name, pick up only the first sound and discard the picture from your mind.” Thus, the hieroglyph for an ox, aleph, helped give a shape to the letter “a,” while the alphabet’s inventors derived “b” from the hieroglyph for “house,” bêt. These first two signs came to form the name of the system itself: alphabet. Some letters were borrowed from hieroglyphs, others drawn from life, until all the sounds of the language they spoke could be represented in written form.

The concept of an alphabet profoundly changed the way we communicate. By turning sounds into symbols, speech could be recorded and deciphered in different languages, and new words can be constructed without previous written context. The theory that the idea was developed by itinerant laborers working together to overcome their illiteracy in a foreign country is an intriguing idea, which you can read about at Smithsonian.

(Image credit: British Museum)

The 1994 film The Shawshank Redemption was not a hit in theaters, most likely because of the incomprehensible title and the lack of explosions. In the years since, it's become a favorite drama for the male half of the internet generation. Finally, Screen Junkies did an Honest Trailer for the movie by popular demand, although they had to reach to find anything bad to say about The Shawshank Redemption. They gave it their best shot anyway.

When we think of a coat of arms, we think of nobility, wealth, and power, passed along through generations. A family coat of arms should be a symbol to be proud of, at least until we learn that there were far more of these symbols than we ever realized, and someone had to make them up to begin with. And through modern eyes, they didn't put enough thought into some of them.

It seems that the immortal symbols of nobility don't all hold up to the same aesthetic scrutiny. The above heraldry is taken from the pages of Konrad Grunenberg's Wappenbuch (Book of Arms), a comprehensive collection of coats of arms commissioned as a gift to the Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick III, in 1480. The book is a real Who's Who of the HRE, listing the arms of its nobles, important burghers but also foreign kings. It's also a collection of who could think up the goofiest symbols, like a fish with a trumpet for a nose ...

There is some speculation that Grunenberg's index is not altogether accurate, and many of the entries could have been made up of whole cloth, for political or comedic reasons. Who knows? It appears that his depictions all contain the same helmet, as if he had a medieval version of copy-paste and just drew pictures around them from someone's description. You can flip through the Wappenbuch yourself here. Or see the highlights, meaning the weirdest examples of coats of arms from the book at Cracked.

The Incas ground peanuts into paste thousands of years ago, but who invented the modern incarnation of peanut butter? If you had to guess, you'd probably say George Washington Carver, but it was John Harvey Kellogg who filed the patent in 1895. Yes, the same guy who developed modern breakfast cereal at his sanitarium in Battle Creek, Michigan.  

A Seventh-Day Adventist, Kellogg endorsed a plant-based diet and promoted peanut butter as a healthy alternative to meat, which he saw as a digestive irritant and, worse, a sinful sexual stimulant. His efforts and his elite clientele, which included Amelia Earhart, Sojourner Truth and Henry Ford, helped establish peanut butter as a delicacy. As early as 1896, Good Housekeeping encouraged women to make their own with a meat grinder, and suggested pairing the spread with bread. “The active brains of American inventors have found new economic uses for the peanut,” the Chicago Tribune rhapsodized in July 1897.

Kellogg's peanut butter had its problems, though, and the product went through changes as it became tastier and more amenable to mass production. Throughout the 20th century, peanut butter gained popularity as a protein alternative to expensive meat. Read the history of peanut butter, plus a look at the work George Washington Carver did to promote peanut crops at Smithsonian.

(Image credit: PeanutButter1046)

Last month, a truck driver in British Columbia witnessed an oncoming vehicle run over a cat in the road. The truck driver stopped and found that the small cat was not only injured, but was frozen to the road! He took her to the nearest veterinary clinic, and she is now in the custody of the SPCA.

It’s believed the female cat had been wandering and became hypothermic before collapsing in the middle of the road, where she became frozen to the pavement.

Once in the care of BC SPCA in Fort St. John, where the cat was given fluids and placed in a warming tent, she gradually became bright and alert, allowing the staff to continue their assessment of her other serious injuries which include a severely fractured knee, skin wounds and road rash. The estimated cost for ongoing care is $2,500.

The cat, which doesn’t have a name yet, is “extremely friendly and was purring and kneading the vet’s smocks as soon as she began to recover from her hypothermia,” the BC SPCA said.

A public request for funding the cat's care has far exceeded its goal by raising $15,000. For now, the SPCA is calling her the Ice Road Kitten, and asked the public to suggest a name. The finalists are "Elsa" and "Miracle." You can read the story of the ice road cat rescue at the Aldergrove Star. -via Fark